Quality of Institution and Slave Trade in Africa

Abstract

Nunn (2008) provided the first empirical evidence that linked slave trade to Africa's current poor economic development. In this paper, Nunn put forward a number of channels through which slave trade may have impacted on the current economic development in Africa. The channels he proposed include; mistrust, ethnic fractionalization, and state development. In this paper, I have looked at the possibility of the quality of institution as a channel through which slave trade has affected the continent's economy. Using Nunn's data and OLS estimation framework. I found no relationship between slave exports and each of the six indicators that I used to measure quality of institutions in Africa. I further used instrumental variables to mitigate the measurement errors of slave exports but still could not find a conclusive effect of slave trade on the quality of institutions in Africa.