postcol_growth: Post-Colonial Growth in the African Continent

In stevedata: Steve's Toy Data for Teaching About a Variety of Methodological, Social, and Political Topics

Post-Colonial Growth in the African Continent

Description

A simple data set on post-colonial growth trajectories in the African continent, for intended use to instruct students about t-tests around the application of colonial legacies.

Usage

postcol_growth

Format

A data frame with 53 observations on the following 11 variables.

ccode

a Correlates of War state code

cw_name

a Correlates of War state name

styear

the start year for latest system entry for the state

IndFrom

a Correlates of War state code, if applicable, identifying the state from which the state identified in the ccode gained independence

colmast

a character vector largely corresponding with the information in IndFrom with only slight changes

mrgdppcind

an estimate of GDP per capita for the year identified in the styear column, itself largely corresponding with independence from the state identified in IndFrom and colmast

mrgdppc5

an estimate of GDP per capita 5 years from the year identified in the styear column

mrgdppc10

an estimate of GDP per capita 10 years from the year identified in the styear column

mrgdppc15

an estimate of GDP per capita 15 years from the year identified in the styear column

mrgdppc20

an estimate of GDP per capita 20 years from the year identified in the styear column

mrgdppc25

an estimate of GDP per capita 25 years from the year identified in the styear column

Details

Data are generated with assistance from isard, another R package I maintain.

Data are sliced to record only latest system entry into the CoW data, which concerns states (like Morocco, Tunisia, and Ethiopia) that were temporarily occupied and eliminated.

I take some liberties classifying former colonial masters in the colmast column. Namely, I elect to not record Ethiopia's independence from Italy as suggesting Italy was a colonial master of Ethiopia. I do not code South Africa's independence from the United Kingdom as noteworthy for the sake of this analysis (given the topic of interest to me for creating these data). Senegal nominally gains independence from Mali when it leaves the Mali Federation, but I attributes its independence to being ultimately from France. Morocco and Tunisia were protectorates of France though the ICOW measure of colonial history says it gains independence from the Ottoman Empire. I do not consider Namibia (South Africa) or Eritrea (Ethiopia) to be colonial under the states from which they gained independence.

The estimates of GDP per capita are real GDP per capita in prices constant across countries and over time (in 2011 international dollars, PPP). These data are sourced from the Maddison project database but are the product of simulations by Farris et al. (2022). You can read a bit more about these in the sources in the reference section, or in the documentation for the cw_gdppop data frame in the isard package.

Colonial history data come by way of ICOW (v. 1.1).

References

Bolt, Jutta, Robert Inklaar, Herman de Jong, and Luiten Janvan Zanden. 2018. "Rebasing 'Maddison': New Income Comparisons and the Shape of Long-Run Economic Development." Maddison Project Working paper 10.

Fariss, Christopher, J., Therese Anders, Jonathan N. Markowitz, and Miriam Barnum. 2022. "New Estimates of Over 500 Years of Historic GDP and Population Data." Journal of Conflict Resolution 66(3): 553–91.

Hensel, Paul R. 2018. "ICOW Colonial History Data Set, version 1.1." Available at https://www.paulhensel.org/icowcol.html.

Other Points of Departure

The intended use of these data is to instruct students about t-tests with an application to the development trajectories of former colonies in the African continent. This particular topic is definitely fraught with caveats to consider, and such a simple data set intended to teach students rudimentary methods around a question that might understand just cannot cover all these issues. Please consider the following scholarship on this topic.

Acemoglu, Daron, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson. 2001. "The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical Investigation". American Economic Review 91(5): 1369–1401.

Bolt, Jutta and Dirk Bezemer. 2009. "Understanding Long-Run African Growth: Colonial Institutions or Colonial Education?" The Journal of Development Studies 45(1): 24–54.

Gallup, John Luke, Jeffrey D. Sachs, and Andrew D. Mellinger. 1999. "Geography and Economic Development." International Regional Science Review 22(2): 179–232.

Glaeser, Edward L., Rafael La Porta, Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes, and Andrei Shleifer. 2004. "Do Institutions Cause Growth?" Journal of Economic Growth 9: 271–303.

La Porta, Rafael, Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes, Andrei Shleifer and Robert W. Vishny. 1999. Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization 15(1): 222-79.

stevedata documentation built on Nov. 12, 2025, 5:06 p.m.