Felix Selhausen - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Felix Selhausen
Migration in Africa
Sub-Saharan Africa 1 is the least urbanized region in the world. Yet, home to the world's younges... more Sub-Saharan Africa 1 is the least urbanized region in the world. Yet, home to the world's youngest and fastest-growing population, Africa has recorded faster urban growth than any other world region since 1960. Its urban population has been growing at an average annual rate of 4%-5% since 1960, at much lower income levels than Asia or Latin America. The United Nations forecasted that Africa's urban population is likely to nearly triple between 2018 and 2050. Cities are viewed as important engines of African economic growth, generating a much larger share of countries' GDP than their share of the population (McKinsey 2011; UN-Habitat 2016a). Cities are thus attractive to those in search for economic opportunity. Cities not only ofer higher wages than rural areas, but urban housing, schools, and health facilities also tend to be superior. Such perspectives of urban privilege, upward social mobility, and opportunity remain dominant motivations for rural-urban migration in Africa. Such enthusiasm should not mask the fact that, whereas in other parts of the world urban agglomeration generally has been associated with structural economic change and a move into more productive (formal) jobs, in Africa urban centers are often built around consuming the rents extracted from natural resources. Cities, therefore, have become dominated by locally consumed low-value (informal) services and goods, rather than tradable goods or services (Gollin, Jedwab, and Vollrath 2016). Over the second half of the 20th century Africa's rapid urbanization process (see Maps 13.1 and 13.2), amidst a comparatively poor economic performance, has therefore resulted in rising urban poverty with the majority of urban residents living in slums (Marx, Stoker, and Suri 2013). However, for most of African history, until the mid-20th century, rural-to-rural migration has been of greater prevalence than rural-to-urban fows. 2 Yet, throughout Africa, the onset of colonial rule accelerated urban growth and structural change, fueled by rural migrant fows (
The Economic History Review
RePEc: Research Papers in Economics, Dec 1, 2009
This work explores what factors determine foreign direct investment (FDI) in sub-Sahara Africa (S... more This work explores what factors determine foreign direct investment (FDI) in sub-Sahara Africa (SSA) relative to non-sub-Saharan African countries, using a panel data set which encompasses most of the world´s developing countries between 1997 and 2006. The results indicate that institutions and infrastructure development promoted FDI to non-SSA but did not induce FDI to sub-Saharan Africa. Geography played a modest and indirect role. The marginal benefit from openness to trade was higher for SSA, which is closely related to resource-seeking FDI that did not translate into sustained economic growth, neither institutional change, but consequently crowded out the second FDI wave of manufacturing. At the same time, FDI into value-added manufacturing largely located in non-SSA countries acted as engine for scaling the economic development ladder through institutional improvement for a number of non-SSA countries. Hence, FDI has the potential to act as a reliable and equitable driver of sustained economic development and poverty alleviation. The destiny of the "resource curse" linked to FDI failure marks the novelty of this paper in the FDI and development literature.
The Economic History Review, 2015
The colonial legacy of African underdevelopment is widely debated but hard to document. We use oc... more The colonial legacy of African underdevelopment is widely debated but hard to document. We use occupational statistics from Protestant marriage registers of historical Kampala to investigate the hypothesis that African gender inequality and female disempowerment are rooted in colonial times. We find that the arrival of Europeans in Uganda ignited a century-long transformation of Kampala involving a gender Kuznets curve. Men rapidly acquired literacy and quickly found their way into white-collar (high-status) employment in the wage economy built by the Europeans. Women took somewhat longer to obtain literacy and considerably longer to enter into white-collar and waged work. This led to increased gender inequality during the first half of the colonial period. But gender inequality gradually declined during the latter half of the colonial era, and after Uganda's independence in 1962 its level was not significantly different from that of pre-colonial times. Our data support Boserup's view that gender inequality was rooted in native social norms: daughters of African men who worked in the traditional, informal economy were less well educated, less frequently employed in formal work, and more often subjected to marital gender inequality than daughters of men employed in the modernized, formal economy created by the Europeans.
This study on female entrepreneurs in Western Uganda provides empirical evidence on the socio-eco... more This study on female entrepreneurs in Western Uganda provides empirical evidence on the socio-economic effects of participation in a microfinance cooperative of both the female entrepreneur and her husband. Participation by female entrepreneurs in a microfinance cooperative is not an unconditional blessing: even though it does deliver higher household incomes, it might also deteriorate the female’s household decision-making power when her husband participates in the same self-help group of the microfinance cooperative. This offers new insights for development policy and for entrepreneurship scholars to study the bright and dark sides of microfinance.
This thesis offers new empirical insights on women’s empowerment in colonial and present-day in U... more This thesis offers new empirical insights on women’s empowerment in colonial and present-day in Uganda. This thesis is organised into two parts. The first part, offers a novel perspective on the long-term development of African male and female human capital formation, skills, labour market participation, intergenerational social mobility, and marriage patterns over the long 20th century, using unique individual-level data from hitherto unexplored Anglican marriage registers. In the second part, a large-scale field survey in Western Uganda highlights the challenges smallholder women face in present-day rural Uganda and investigates the determinants for women’s participation in co-operatives and the potential of collective action to improve female smallholders’ relative social and economic position. To achieve this, the thesis focuses on an in-depth case-study of a single African country, Uganda.
Population and Development Review, 2021
To what extent was the 20th century schooling revolution in sub-Saharan Africa shared equally bet... more To what extent was the 20th century schooling revolution in sub-Saharan Africa shared equally between men and women? We examine trajectories of educational gender inequality over the 20th century, using census data from 21 African countries and applying a birth-cohort approach. We present three sets of findings. First, compared to other developing regions with similar histories of colonial rule and educational expansion, sub-Saharan Africa performed comparatively poorly in closing educational gender gaps (M-F) and gender ratios (M/F) over the 20th century. Second, in most African countries, the educational gender gap rose during the colonial era, peaked mid-century, and declined, albeit at very different rates, after independence. Southern African countries were remarkably gender equal, both in terms of gaps and ratios. French (former) colonies had smaller gaps but higher ratios than British (former) colonies, which we attribute to slower expansion of male education in the former. B...
Wiley-Blackwell: Economic History Review, 2015
This article uses Anglican marriage registers from colonial and post-colonial Uganda to investiga... more This article uses Anglican marriage registers from colonial and post-colonial Uganda to investigate long-term trends and determinants of intergenerational social mobility among Christian African men. We show that the colonial era opened up new labour opportunities for our African converts enabling them to take large steps up the social ladder regardless of their social origin. Contrary to the widespread belief that British indirect rule perpetuated the power of pre-colonial African elites, we show that a remarkably fluid colonial labour economy actually undermined their social advantages. Sons of traditional landed chiefs gradually lost their high social-status monopoly to a new commercially-orientated and well-educated class of Anglican Ugandans, who mostly came from non-elite and even lower-class backgrounds. We also document that the colonial administration and the Anglican mission functioned as key steps on the ladder to upward mobility, and that mission education helped provide...
One of the most powerful cultural transformations in modern history has been the dramatic expansi... more One of the most powerful cultural transformations in modern history has been the dramatic expansion of Christianity outside Europe. Recent, yet extensive, literature uses Christian missions established during colonial times as a source of exogenous variation to study the long-term effects of religion, human capital and culture in Africa, the Americas and Asia. We argue that the endogeneity of missionary expansion may be underestimated, thus questioning the link between missions and economic development. Using annual panel data on missions from 1751 to 1932 in Ghana as well as cross-sectional data on missions for 43 sub-Saharan African countries in 1900 and 1924, we show that: (i) locational decisions were driven by economic factors, as missionaries went to healthier, safer, and more accessible and developed areas, privileging the best locations first; (ii) these factors may spuriously explain why locations with past missions are more developed today, especially as most studies rely ...
Women smallholders face greater constraints than men in accessing capital and commodity markets i... more Women smallholders face greater constraints than men in accessing capital and commodity markets in Sub-Saharan Africa. Collective action has been promoted to remedy those disadvantages. Using survey data of 421 women members and 210 nonmembers of a coffee producer cooperative in Western Uganda, this study investigates the determinants of women's participation in cooperatives and women's intensity of participation. The results highlight the importance of access to and control over land for women to join the cooperative in the first place. Participation intensity is measured through women's participation in collective coffee marketing and share capital contributions. It is found that duration of membership, access to extension services, more equal intrahousehold power relations, and joint land ownership positively influence women's ability to commit to collective action. These findings demonstrate the embeddedness of collective action in gender relations and the positi...
This work explores what factors determine foreign direct investment (FDI) in sub-Sahara Africa (S... more This work explores what factors determine foreign direct investment (FDI) in sub-Sahara Africa (SSA) relative to non-sub-Saharan African countries, using a panel data set which encompasses most of the world´s developing countries between 1997 and 2006. The results indicate that institutions and infrastructure development promoted FDI to non-SSA but did not induce FDI to sub-Saharan Africa. Geography played a modest and indirect role. The marginal benefit from openness to trade was higher for SSA, which is closely related to resource-seeking FDI that did not translate into sustained economic growth, neither institutional change, but consequently crowded out the second FDI wave of manufacturing. At the same time, FDI into value-added manufacturing largely located in non-SSA countries acted as engine for scaling the economic development ladder through institutional improvement for a number of non-SSA countries. Hence, FDI has the potential to act as a reliable and equitable driver of s...
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization
Protestant missionaries have recently been praised for their comparatively benign features concer... more Protestant missionaries have recently been praised for their comparatively benign features concerning female education in Africa. Using a new dataset of 5,212 Protestant brides born between 1880 and 1945 from urban and rural Uganda, this paper offers a first pass at analyzing empirically the role of mission education on African women's socioeconomic position within the household. The paper finds that although, mission education raised the sampled brides' literacy skills way above female national levels, they were largely excluded from participating in the colonial wage labour market. In this context, the missionary society presented an almost exclusive source of female wage labour in areas of religious service, schooling and medical care. While literacy per se did not affect women's marriage behaviour, women who worked for the missionaries married significantly later in life and married men closer to their own age, signaling a shift in the power balance between parents and daughters and between husband and wife. On average, daughters of fathers deeply entrenched in the missionary movement had the highest chances to access wage employment, emphasizing the importance of paternal mission networks for Protestant women's work outside the household during colonial times.
Social History of Medicine, Mar 16, 2019
This paper sheds new light on the impact and experience of western biomedicine in colonial Africa... more This paper sheds new light on the impact and experience of western biomedicine in colonial Africa. We use patient registers from Western Uganda's earliest mission hospital to explore whether and how Christian conversion and mission education affected African health behaviour. A dataset of 18,600 admissions permits analysis of patients' age, sex, residence, religion, diagnoses, duration of hospitalisation, and treatment outcomes. We document Toro Hospital's substantial geographic reach, trace evolving treatment practices, and highlight significant variation in hospital-based disease incidence between the early colonial and early postcolonial periods. We observe no relationship between numeracy and health outcomes, nor religion-specific effects concerning hygiene-related infections. Christian conversion was associated with superior cure rates and shorter length of stay, and with lower incidence of skin diseases and sexually-transmitted infections (STIs). However, our findings indicate that STI-incidence was linked to morality campaigns and that clinicians' diagnoses were influenced by assumptions around religious groups' sexual behaviour.
The Economic History Review, 2015
The colonial legacy of African underdevelopment is widely debated but hard to document. We use oc... more The colonial legacy of African underdevelopment is widely debated but hard to document. We use occupational statistics from Protestant marriage registers of historical Kampala to investigate the hypothesis that African gender inequality and female disempowerment are rooted in colonial times. We find that the arrival of Europeans in Uganda ignited a century-long transformation of Kampala involving a gender Kuznets curve. Men rapidly acquired literacy and quickly found their way into white-collar (high-status) employment in the wage economy built by the Europeans. Women took somewhat longer to obtain literacy and considerably longer to enter into white-collar and waged work. This led to increased gender inequality during the first half of the colonial period. But gender inequality gradually declined during the latter half of the colonial era, and after Uganda's independence in 1962 its level was not significantly different from that of pre-colonial times. Our data support Boserup's view that gender inequality was rooted in native social norms: daughters of African men who worked in the traditional, informal economy were less well educated, less frequently employed in formal work, and more often subjected to marital gender inequality than daughters of men employed in the modernized, formal economy created by the Europeans.
This work explores what factors determine foreign direct investment (FDI) in sub-Sahara Africa (S... more This work explores what factors determine foreign direct investment (FDI) in sub-Sahara Africa (SSA) relative to non-sub-Saharan African countries, using a panel data set which encompasses most of the world´s developing countries between 1997 and 2006. The results indicate that institutions and infrastructure development promoted FDI to non-SSA but did not induce FDI to sub-Saharan Africa. Geography played a modest and indirect role. The marginal benefit from openness to trade was higher for SSA, which is closely related to resource-seeking FDI that did not translate into sustained economic growth, neither institutional change, but consequently crowded out the second FDI wave of manufacturing. At the same time, FDI into value-added manufacturing largely located in non-SSA countries acted as engine for scaling the economic development ladder through institutional improvement for a number of non-SSA countries. Hence, FDI has the potential to act as a reliable and equitable driver of s...
Migration in Africa
Sub-Saharan Africa 1 is the least urbanized region in the world. Yet, home to the world's younges... more Sub-Saharan Africa 1 is the least urbanized region in the world. Yet, home to the world's youngest and fastest-growing population, Africa has recorded faster urban growth than any other world region since 1960. Its urban population has been growing at an average annual rate of 4%-5% since 1960, at much lower income levels than Asia or Latin America. The United Nations forecasted that Africa's urban population is likely to nearly triple between 2018 and 2050. Cities are viewed as important engines of African economic growth, generating a much larger share of countries' GDP than their share of the population (McKinsey 2011; UN-Habitat 2016a). Cities are thus attractive to those in search for economic opportunity. Cities not only ofer higher wages than rural areas, but urban housing, schools, and health facilities also tend to be superior. Such perspectives of urban privilege, upward social mobility, and opportunity remain dominant motivations for rural-urban migration in Africa. Such enthusiasm should not mask the fact that, whereas in other parts of the world urban agglomeration generally has been associated with structural economic change and a move into more productive (formal) jobs, in Africa urban centers are often built around consuming the rents extracted from natural resources. Cities, therefore, have become dominated by locally consumed low-value (informal) services and goods, rather than tradable goods or services (Gollin, Jedwab, and Vollrath 2016). Over the second half of the 20th century Africa's rapid urbanization process (see Maps 13.1 and 13.2), amidst a comparatively poor economic performance, has therefore resulted in rising urban poverty with the majority of urban residents living in slums (Marx, Stoker, and Suri 2013). However, for most of African history, until the mid-20th century, rural-to-rural migration has been of greater prevalence than rural-to-urban fows. 2 Yet, throughout Africa, the onset of colonial rule accelerated urban growth and structural change, fueled by rural migrant fows (
The Economic History Review
RePEc: Research Papers in Economics, Dec 1, 2009
This work explores what factors determine foreign direct investment (FDI) in sub-Sahara Africa (S... more This work explores what factors determine foreign direct investment (FDI) in sub-Sahara Africa (SSA) relative to non-sub-Saharan African countries, using a panel data set which encompasses most of the world´s developing countries between 1997 and 2006. The results indicate that institutions and infrastructure development promoted FDI to non-SSA but did not induce FDI to sub-Saharan Africa. Geography played a modest and indirect role. The marginal benefit from openness to trade was higher for SSA, which is closely related to resource-seeking FDI that did not translate into sustained economic growth, neither institutional change, but consequently crowded out the second FDI wave of manufacturing. At the same time, FDI into value-added manufacturing largely located in non-SSA countries acted as engine for scaling the economic development ladder through institutional improvement for a number of non-SSA countries. Hence, FDI has the potential to act as a reliable and equitable driver of sustained economic development and poverty alleviation. The destiny of the "resource curse" linked to FDI failure marks the novelty of this paper in the FDI and development literature.
The Economic History Review, 2015
The colonial legacy of African underdevelopment is widely debated but hard to document. We use oc... more The colonial legacy of African underdevelopment is widely debated but hard to document. We use occupational statistics from Protestant marriage registers of historical Kampala to investigate the hypothesis that African gender inequality and female disempowerment are rooted in colonial times. We find that the arrival of Europeans in Uganda ignited a century-long transformation of Kampala involving a gender Kuznets curve. Men rapidly acquired literacy and quickly found their way into white-collar (high-status) employment in the wage economy built by the Europeans. Women took somewhat longer to obtain literacy and considerably longer to enter into white-collar and waged work. This led to increased gender inequality during the first half of the colonial period. But gender inequality gradually declined during the latter half of the colonial era, and after Uganda's independence in 1962 its level was not significantly different from that of pre-colonial times. Our data support Boserup's view that gender inequality was rooted in native social norms: daughters of African men who worked in the traditional, informal economy were less well educated, less frequently employed in formal work, and more often subjected to marital gender inequality than daughters of men employed in the modernized, formal economy created by the Europeans.
This study on female entrepreneurs in Western Uganda provides empirical evidence on the socio-eco... more This study on female entrepreneurs in Western Uganda provides empirical evidence on the socio-economic effects of participation in a microfinance cooperative of both the female entrepreneur and her husband. Participation by female entrepreneurs in a microfinance cooperative is not an unconditional blessing: even though it does deliver higher household incomes, it might also deteriorate the female’s household decision-making power when her husband participates in the same self-help group of the microfinance cooperative. This offers new insights for development policy and for entrepreneurship scholars to study the bright and dark sides of microfinance.
This thesis offers new empirical insights on women’s empowerment in colonial and present-day in U... more This thesis offers new empirical insights on women’s empowerment in colonial and present-day in Uganda. This thesis is organised into two parts. The first part, offers a novel perspective on the long-term development of African male and female human capital formation, skills, labour market participation, intergenerational social mobility, and marriage patterns over the long 20th century, using unique individual-level data from hitherto unexplored Anglican marriage registers. In the second part, a large-scale field survey in Western Uganda highlights the challenges smallholder women face in present-day rural Uganda and investigates the determinants for women’s participation in co-operatives and the potential of collective action to improve female smallholders’ relative social and economic position. To achieve this, the thesis focuses on an in-depth case-study of a single African country, Uganda.
Population and Development Review, 2021
To what extent was the 20th century schooling revolution in sub-Saharan Africa shared equally bet... more To what extent was the 20th century schooling revolution in sub-Saharan Africa shared equally between men and women? We examine trajectories of educational gender inequality over the 20th century, using census data from 21 African countries and applying a birth-cohort approach. We present three sets of findings. First, compared to other developing regions with similar histories of colonial rule and educational expansion, sub-Saharan Africa performed comparatively poorly in closing educational gender gaps (M-F) and gender ratios (M/F) over the 20th century. Second, in most African countries, the educational gender gap rose during the colonial era, peaked mid-century, and declined, albeit at very different rates, after independence. Southern African countries were remarkably gender equal, both in terms of gaps and ratios. French (former) colonies had smaller gaps but higher ratios than British (former) colonies, which we attribute to slower expansion of male education in the former. B...
Wiley-Blackwell: Economic History Review, 2015
This article uses Anglican marriage registers from colonial and post-colonial Uganda to investiga... more This article uses Anglican marriage registers from colonial and post-colonial Uganda to investigate long-term trends and determinants of intergenerational social mobility among Christian African men. We show that the colonial era opened up new labour opportunities for our African converts enabling them to take large steps up the social ladder regardless of their social origin. Contrary to the widespread belief that British indirect rule perpetuated the power of pre-colonial African elites, we show that a remarkably fluid colonial labour economy actually undermined their social advantages. Sons of traditional landed chiefs gradually lost their high social-status monopoly to a new commercially-orientated and well-educated class of Anglican Ugandans, who mostly came from non-elite and even lower-class backgrounds. We also document that the colonial administration and the Anglican mission functioned as key steps on the ladder to upward mobility, and that mission education helped provide...
One of the most powerful cultural transformations in modern history has been the dramatic expansi... more One of the most powerful cultural transformations in modern history has been the dramatic expansion of Christianity outside Europe. Recent, yet extensive, literature uses Christian missions established during colonial times as a source of exogenous variation to study the long-term effects of religion, human capital and culture in Africa, the Americas and Asia. We argue that the endogeneity of missionary expansion may be underestimated, thus questioning the link between missions and economic development. Using annual panel data on missions from 1751 to 1932 in Ghana as well as cross-sectional data on missions for 43 sub-Saharan African countries in 1900 and 1924, we show that: (i) locational decisions were driven by economic factors, as missionaries went to healthier, safer, and more accessible and developed areas, privileging the best locations first; (ii) these factors may spuriously explain why locations with past missions are more developed today, especially as most studies rely ...
Women smallholders face greater constraints than men in accessing capital and commodity markets i... more Women smallholders face greater constraints than men in accessing capital and commodity markets in Sub-Saharan Africa. Collective action has been promoted to remedy those disadvantages. Using survey data of 421 women members and 210 nonmembers of a coffee producer cooperative in Western Uganda, this study investigates the determinants of women's participation in cooperatives and women's intensity of participation. The results highlight the importance of access to and control over land for women to join the cooperative in the first place. Participation intensity is measured through women's participation in collective coffee marketing and share capital contributions. It is found that duration of membership, access to extension services, more equal intrahousehold power relations, and joint land ownership positively influence women's ability to commit to collective action. These findings demonstrate the embeddedness of collective action in gender relations and the positi...
This work explores what factors determine foreign direct investment (FDI) in sub-Sahara Africa (S... more This work explores what factors determine foreign direct investment (FDI) in sub-Sahara Africa (SSA) relative to non-sub-Saharan African countries, using a panel data set which encompasses most of the world´s developing countries between 1997 and 2006. The results indicate that institutions and infrastructure development promoted FDI to non-SSA but did not induce FDI to sub-Saharan Africa. Geography played a modest and indirect role. The marginal benefit from openness to trade was higher for SSA, which is closely related to resource-seeking FDI that did not translate into sustained economic growth, neither institutional change, but consequently crowded out the second FDI wave of manufacturing. At the same time, FDI into value-added manufacturing largely located in non-SSA countries acted as engine for scaling the economic development ladder through institutional improvement for a number of non-SSA countries. Hence, FDI has the potential to act as a reliable and equitable driver of s...
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization
Protestant missionaries have recently been praised for their comparatively benign features concer... more Protestant missionaries have recently been praised for their comparatively benign features concerning female education in Africa. Using a new dataset of 5,212 Protestant brides born between 1880 and 1945 from urban and rural Uganda, this paper offers a first pass at analyzing empirically the role of mission education on African women's socioeconomic position within the household. The paper finds that although, mission education raised the sampled brides' literacy skills way above female national levels, they were largely excluded from participating in the colonial wage labour market. In this context, the missionary society presented an almost exclusive source of female wage labour in areas of religious service, schooling and medical care. While literacy per se did not affect women's marriage behaviour, women who worked for the missionaries married significantly later in life and married men closer to their own age, signaling a shift in the power balance between parents and daughters and between husband and wife. On average, daughters of fathers deeply entrenched in the missionary movement had the highest chances to access wage employment, emphasizing the importance of paternal mission networks for Protestant women's work outside the household during colonial times.
Social History of Medicine, Mar 16, 2019
This paper sheds new light on the impact and experience of western biomedicine in colonial Africa... more This paper sheds new light on the impact and experience of western biomedicine in colonial Africa. We use patient registers from Western Uganda's earliest mission hospital to explore whether and how Christian conversion and mission education affected African health behaviour. A dataset of 18,600 admissions permits analysis of patients' age, sex, residence, religion, diagnoses, duration of hospitalisation, and treatment outcomes. We document Toro Hospital's substantial geographic reach, trace evolving treatment practices, and highlight significant variation in hospital-based disease incidence between the early colonial and early postcolonial periods. We observe no relationship between numeracy and health outcomes, nor religion-specific effects concerning hygiene-related infections. Christian conversion was associated with superior cure rates and shorter length of stay, and with lower incidence of skin diseases and sexually-transmitted infections (STIs). However, our findings indicate that STI-incidence was linked to morality campaigns and that clinicians' diagnoses were influenced by assumptions around religious groups' sexual behaviour.
The Economic History Review, 2015
The colonial legacy of African underdevelopment is widely debated but hard to document. We use oc... more The colonial legacy of African underdevelopment is widely debated but hard to document. We use occupational statistics from Protestant marriage registers of historical Kampala to investigate the hypothesis that African gender inequality and female disempowerment are rooted in colonial times. We find that the arrival of Europeans in Uganda ignited a century-long transformation of Kampala involving a gender Kuznets curve. Men rapidly acquired literacy and quickly found their way into white-collar (high-status) employment in the wage economy built by the Europeans. Women took somewhat longer to obtain literacy and considerably longer to enter into white-collar and waged work. This led to increased gender inequality during the first half of the colonial period. But gender inequality gradually declined during the latter half of the colonial era, and after Uganda's independence in 1962 its level was not significantly different from that of pre-colonial times. Our data support Boserup's view that gender inequality was rooted in native social norms: daughters of African men who worked in the traditional, informal economy were less well educated, less frequently employed in formal work, and more often subjected to marital gender inequality than daughters of men employed in the modernized, formal economy created by the Europeans.
This work explores what factors determine foreign direct investment (FDI) in sub-Sahara Africa (S... more This work explores what factors determine foreign direct investment (FDI) in sub-Sahara Africa (SSA) relative to non-sub-Saharan African countries, using a panel data set which encompasses most of the world´s developing countries between 1997 and 2006. The results indicate that institutions and infrastructure development promoted FDI to non-SSA but did not induce FDI to sub-Saharan Africa. Geography played a modest and indirect role. The marginal benefit from openness to trade was higher for SSA, which is closely related to resource-seeking FDI that did not translate into sustained economic growth, neither institutional change, but consequently crowded out the second FDI wave of manufacturing. At the same time, FDI into value-added manufacturing largely located in non-SSA countries acted as engine for scaling the economic development ladder through institutional improvement for a number of non-SSA countries. Hence, FDI has the potential to act as a reliable and equitable driver of s...