Lost Decades: Lessons from Post-Independence Latin America for Today's Africa

Abstract

Africa and Latin America secured their independence from European colonial rule a century and half apart: most of Latin America after 1820 and most of Africa after 1960. Despite the distance in time and space, they share important similarities. In each case independence was followed by political instability, violent conflict and economic stagnation lasting for about a half-century (lost decades). The parallels suggest that Africa might be exiting from a period of post-imperial collapse and entering a period of relative political stability and economic growth, as did Latin America a century and a half earlier. Imperial CollapseIt is important to stress that the decline of imperialism in both Latin America and Africa was not driven by some endogenous response to local forces but rather by exogenous events in Europe. In the former case, it was the Napoleonic wars that eroded the British appointed local politicians to legislative institutions; later, they filled these posts through elections; and later still they modified the Executive Council -the colonial governor's Cabinet -in the same manner.

Tendencias y coyunturas agrarias del Litoral rioplatense, 1760-1800: un análisis cuantitativo

“…Desde entonces han cobrado vigor diversos debates sobre la «herencia colonial» donde es posible distinguir una línea de investigación que intenta producir indicadores de desempeño económico y de bienestar para diversas economías del período, con el objetivo de discutir si efectivamente la situación de las economías latinoamericanas al final de la colonización ibérica ya constituía un fracaso con relación a otras regiones del globo (Coastworth, 1998, pp. 23-54;Bates et al, 2006;Prados de la Escosura, 2004Dobado, 2009;Dobado y García Montero, 2010;Williamson, 2010).…”

Output Per Head in Pre-Independence Africa: Quantitative Conjectures

“…Colonial administrations built infrastructural links between ports and production centres for cash crops and minerals in the interior with apparently a major impact on capital formation (Wood and Mayer 2001). After independence, trade expansion, that brought with it an improvement in the net barter terms of trade, occurred between the mid-1960s and 1970s (Deaton 1999, Bates et al 2007), and the inflow of foreign capital contributed to a better resource allocation and to an increase in output (Rodrik 1998, Wood andMayer 2001).…”

“…As a result, they have concluded that Africa failed to grow in the long run (Jerven 2010). Lack of hard empirical evidence has not prevented the emergence of explicit thought-provoking hypotheses about the causes of Africa's long-term retardation (Acemoglu and Robinson 2010, Bates et al 2007, Heldring and Robinson 2012, Nunn 2008. Often, however, these writers are guilty of what Gareth Austin has labelled a 'compression of history' (Austin 2008).…”

Rural bias in African electoral systems: Legacies of unequal representation in African democracies

“…The analysis provides clear evidence of rural-favoring or rural-biased malapportionment in our sample, showing that it pre-dates Africa's return to multipartism of the 1990s and has persisted largely unmitigated throughout the multiparty era, even where opposition parties have come to power. The results call for rethinking the oft repeated claim that regimes of the one-party era represented a "core coalition of urban interests" (Bates et al, 2007) while maintaining few links with the rural areas (Herbst 2000), thus leaving rural peasantries "uncaptured by the state" (Hyden 1980). Mamdani (1996;295) summarized the prevailing scholarly wisdom of the mid-1990s: the rural masses were viewed as an invisible, residual factor in politics, largely outside the purview of state action and control.…”