The Long-Term Effects of Africa's Slave Trades

Nathan Nunn

NBER Working Paper No. 13367
Issued in September 2007
NBER Program(s):   ITI

Can part of Africa's current underdevelopment be explained by its slave trades? To explore this question, I use data from shipping records and historical documents reporting slave ethnicities to construct estimates of the number of slaves exported from each country during Africa's slave trades. I find a robust negative relationship between the number of slaves exported from a country and current economic performance. To better understand if the relationship is causal, I examine the historical evidence on selection into the slave trades, and use instrumental variables. Together the evidence suggests that the slave trades have had an adverse effect on economic development.

Acknowledgments

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Document Object Identifier (DOI): 10.3386/w13367

Published: Nathan Nunn, 2008. "The Long-Term Effects of Africa's Slave Trades," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, MIT Press, vol. 123(1), pages 139-176, 02. citation courtesy of

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