Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Moving Forward in Rural Ghana: Investing in Social and Human Capital Mitigates Historical Constraints

Moving Forward in Rural Ghana: Investing in Social and Human Capital Mitigates Historical... There is now considerable evidence to suggest that historical events have had long-term impacts on economic outcomes in Africa. What is less widely studied is the potential for mitigating such impacts. We surveyed 400 pineapple farmers in Ghana and find that both the historical dependency on different crops and the impact of the trans-Atlantic slave trade predict income differences in 2013. However, not all farmers are affected equally by history. Using instrumental variables to identify causal effects, we find that human and social capital are pivotal for overcoming historically inherited constraints. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Economic History of Developing Regions Taylor & Francis

Moving Forward in Rural Ghana: Investing in Social and Human Capital Mitigates Historical Constraints

Download PDF

Moving Forward in Rural Ghana: Investing in Social and Human Capital Mitigates Historical Constraints

Wuepper, David; Sauer, Johannes
Economic History of Developing Regions , Volume 32 (2): 33 – May 4, 2017

Abstract

There is now considerable evidence to suggest that historical events have had long-term impacts on economic outcomes in Africa. What is less widely studied is the potential for mitigating such impacts. We surveyed 400 pineapple farmers in Ghana and find that both the historical dependency on different crops and the impact of the trans-Atlantic slave trade predict income differences in 2013. However, not all farmers are affected equally by history. Using instrumental variables to identify causal effects, we find that human and social capital are pivotal for overcoming historically inherited constraints.

Loading next page...
 
/lp/taylor-francis/moving-forward-in-rural-ghana-investing-in-social-and-human-capital-1aICPfJzHj

References

References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.

Publisher
Taylor & Francis
Copyright
© 2017 Economic History Society of Southern Africa
ISSN
2078-0397
eISSN
2078-0389
DOI
10.1080/20780389.2017.1330654
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

There is now considerable evidence to suggest that historical events have had long-term impacts on economic outcomes in Africa. What is less widely studied is the potential for mitigating such impacts. We surveyed 400 pineapple farmers in Ghana and find that both the historical dependency on different crops and the impact of the trans-Atlantic slave trade predict income differences in 2013. However, not all farmers are affected equally by history. Using instrumental variables to identify causal effects, we find that human and social capital are pivotal for overcoming historically inherited constraints.

Journal

Economic History of Developing Regions – Taylor & Francis

Published: May 4, 2017

Keywords: historical persistence; cultural change; social capital; human capital; diffusion of innovations; N57; N87; N97

References

  • Reversal of Fortune: Geography and Institutions in the Making of the Modern World Income Distribution
  • Institutions, Human Capital, and Development
  • Chiefs: Economic Development and Elite Control of Civil Society in Sierra Leone
  • The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical Investigation
  • Social Capital Vs Institutions in the Growth Process
  • Culture and Institutions
  • The Effect of the Tsetse Fly on African Development
  • The ‘Out of Africa’ Hypothesis, Human Genetic Diversity, and Comparative Economic Development
  • The ‘Reversal of Fortune’ Thesis and the Compression of History: Perspectives From African and Comparative Economic History
  • Social Capital and Technical Information Flows in the Ghanaian Manufacturing Sector
  • Smallholder Participation in Contract Farming: Comparative Evidence From Five Countries
  • The Role of Human Capital in Economic Development Evidence From Aggregate Cross-Country Data
  • Why Does Culture Increase Human Adaptability?
  • The Cultural Niche: Why Social Learning is Essential for Human Adaptation
  • Early Starts, Reversals and Catch-Up in the Process of Economic Development
  • Borders That Divide: Education and Religion in Ghana and Togo Since Colonial Times
  • Learning About a New Technology: Pineapple in Ghana
  • Adoption of Agricultural Innovations in Developing Countries: A Survey
  • The Economic Returns to Social Interaction: Experimental Evidence from Microfinance
  • The Causal History of Africa: Replies to Jerven and Hopkins
  • Does Land Abundance Explain African Institutions?
  • Microeconomics of Technology Adoption
  • Social Capital, Civil Society and Development
  • The Agricultural Origins of Time Preference
  • The Modern Impact of Precolonial Centralization in Africa
  • Human Capital and Regional Development
  • A History of Violence: The Culture of Honor and Homicide in the Us South
  • The Survival of Smallholder Farmers in Agricultural Export Markets
  • The Origin of Predictable Behavior
  • The New Economic History of Africa
  • History Matters: The Long-Term Impact of Colonial Public Investments in French West Africa
  • The Impact of European Settlement within French West Africa: Did Pre-Colonial Prosperous Areas Fall Behind?
  • The Permanent Effects of Transportation Revolutions in Poor Countries: Evidence From Africa
  • Using Experimental Economics to Measure Social Capital and Predict Financial Decisions
  • Organic Certification, Agro-Ecological Practices and Return On Investment: Evidence from Pineapple Producers in Ghana
  • Does Social Capital have an Economic Payoff? A Cross-Country Investigation
  • Trust in Large Organizations
  • A Contribution to the Empirics of Economic Growth
  • Identification of Endogenous Social Effects: The Reflection Problem
  • Economic Analysis of Social Interactions
  • National Institutions and Subnational Development in Africa
  • Pre-Colonial Ethnic Institutions and Contemporary African Development
  • On the Ethnic Origins of African Development: Traditional Chiefs and Pre-Colonial Political Centralization
  • The Influence of Ancestral Lifeways on Individual Economic Outcomes in Sub-Saharan Africa
  • The Long-Term Effects of Africa's Slave Trades
  • Religious Conversion in Colonial Africa
  • Culture And The Historical Process
  • Historical Development
  • Ruggedness: The Blessing of Bad Geography in Africa
  • The Slave Trade and the Origins of Mistrust in Africa
  • Social Capital and Human Capital in the Colonies: A Study of Cocoa Farmers in Western Nigeria
  • Decentralised Innovation Systems and Poverty Reduction: Experimental Evidence from Central Africa
  • Do Decentralized Innovation Systems Promote Agricultural Technology Adoption? Experimental Evidence from Africa
  • Social Trust and Human Capital Formation
  • Agriculture, Diffusion and Development: Ripple Effects of the Neolithic Revolution
  • Tropical Root Crops
  • The Value of the Ability to Deal with Disequilibria
  • Nobel Lecture: The Economics of Being Poor
  • How Deep are the Roots of Economic Development?
  • Exporting Raises Productivity in Sub-Saharan African Manufacturing Firms
  • Persecution Perpetuated: The Medieval Origins of Anti-Semitic Violence in Nazi Germany
  • Exports and Productivity: A Survey of the Evidence From Firm-Level Data
  • Education and Human Capital Externalities: Evidence from Colonial Benin
  • You Are Not Alone: Social Capital and Risk Exposure in Rural Ethiopia
  • Explaining the Performance of Contract Farming in Ghana: The Role of Self-Efficacy and Social Capital
  • Sustainable Intensification amongst Ghana’s Pineapple Farmers: The Complexity of an Innovation Determines the Effectiveness of its Training
  • Trust and Growth