N – Ewout Frankema

Frankema, E. (2014) ‘Why was the Dutch legacy so poor? Educational development in the Netherlands Indies, 1871-1942’, CGEH Working paper no. 54, Utrecht University

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The educational legacy of Dutch colonial rule in the Netherlands Indies has been widely regarded as disappointing. This paper probes further into the underlying causes of the poor Dutch legacy. It is argued that the spread of popular education was not only hampered by a lack of financial commitment by the colonial state, but also by notable inequalities in the allocation of funds for education and a major reluctance to support initiatives in investment in private education, which may be interpreted as a consequence of the Dutch metropolitan commitment to secular rule in an overwhelmingly Islamic society.

Frankema, E. and M. van Waijenburg (2013) ‘Endogenous Colonial Institutions: Lessons from Fiscal Capacity Building in British and French Africa, 1880-1940.’ African Economic History Working Paper Series 11/2013.

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Given difficult to access pre-colonial forms of surplus extraction, African colonial governments faced severe constraints to raise revenue for incipient colonial state formation. This paper compares the ways in which the British and the French dealt with this challenge in a quantitative framework. We exploit colonial government budget accounts to construct PPP-adjusted comparisons of per capita government revenue by source. A comparison of fiscal capacity building shows that pragmatic responses to varying local economic, political and demographic conditions can easily be mistaken for specific metropolitan blueprints of colonial governance and that under comparable local circumstances the French and British operated in remarkably similar ways.

Frankema, E. and A. Masé (2012) ‘An Island Drifting Apart. Why Haiti mires in poverty while the Dominican Republic forges ahead’, CGEH Working paper no. 27, Utrecht University

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The 2010 earthquake in Haiti has exposed the extreme vulnerability of a people living in a country where the state and the economy simultaneously fail to deliver. Haiti’s neighbor, the Dominican Republic, has witnessed several phases of strong economic growth since the 1870s and an encouraging transition towards democratic rule in the late 20^th century. How could this Caribbean island drift apart so profoundly? Capitalizing on decades of seminal scholarship in the neo-institutional tradition North, Wallis and Weingast (2009) have developed a new conceptual framework to explain different performance characteristics of societies through time. In this study we put the latest vintage of institutional theory to the test by taking it to the case of Hispaniola. We conclude that it captures the differing internal logic of the political economy in both countries quite well, but that it is of little use to understand the effect of external (international) relations on long term development.

Frankema, E. and M. van Waijenburg (2011) ‘Structural Impediments to African Growth: New Evidence from British African Real Wages, 1880-1965’, CGEH Working paper no. 24, Utrecht University

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Recent studies on African economic history have emphasized the structural impediments to African growth, such as adverse geographical conditions and extractive colonial institutions. The evidence is mainly drawn from cross-country regressions on late 20^th century income levels, assuming persistent effects of historical causes over time. But to which extent has African poverty been a persistent phenomenon? Our study sheds light on this question by providing new evidence on long-term African growth-trajectories. We show that slave trade regressions are not robust for pre-1970s GDP per capita levels, or for pre-1973 and post-1995 growth rates. We calculate urban unskilled real wages of African workers in nine British African countries 1880-1965, adopting Allen’s (2009) subsistence basket methodology. We find that real wages were above subsistence level, rose significantly over time and were, in major parts of British Africa, considerably higher than real wages in Asian cities up to, at least the 1930s. We explain the intra-African variation in real wage levels by varying colonial institutions concerning land alienation, taxation and immigration.

Frankema, E. (2011) ‘The Origins of Formal Education in sub-Saharan Africa Was British Rule More Benign?’, CGEH Working paper no. 5, Utrecht University

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British colonial rule has often been praised for its comparatively benign features, such as its support for local educational development. This paper studies the origins of formal education in sub-Saharan Africa arguing that the beneficial effects of British educational policy should not be overstated. British African colonies showed significantly higher school enrolment rates in the late colonial era, but these were not the result of impressive investment efforts. Missionary schools provided the bulk of education to native Africans at extremely low costs. We show that local African conditions affecting the African reception of missionary education explain much more of the variation in colonial educational outcomes than metropolitan identity.

Frankema E. and M. van Waijenburg (2011) ‘African Real Wages in Asian Perspective, 1880-1940’, CGEH Working paper no. 2, Utrecht University

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This paper offers time-series of urban unskilled labor wages and commodity prices in eight British African colonies (1880-1940) and shows that real wages were above subsistence level and rising, especially during the interwar years. Real wages in West Africa and Mauritius were even considerably higher than in some major Asian cities. Our results cast doubt on studies emphasizing the existence of ‘structural impediments’ to African economic growth. We also document an East-West divergence within Africa and argue this was caused by variations in colonial land and labor market institutions, challenging the view that African colonial institutions were exclusively extractive.

Buelens, F. and E. Frankema (2016) Colonial Adventures in Tropical Agriculture. New Estimates of Returns to Investment in the Netherlands Indies, 1919-1938, Cliometrica 10, 2, 197-224

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How profitable were foreign investments in plantation agriculture in the Netherlands Indies during the late colonial era? We use a new dataset of monthly quoted stock prices and dividends of international companies at the Brussels stock exchange to estimate the returns to investment in tropical agriculture (1919–1938). We adopt the Dimson–March–Staunton method to compute real geometric annual average rates of return and assess our estimates in an international comparative perspective. We find that returns to colonial FDI in the Netherlands Indies during 1919–1928 were impressive (14.3 %), being almost 3 percentage points higher than the world average. In the following decade 1929–1938 fortunes reversed, with a rate of return of -2.8 % compared to a world average of 2.2 %. Over the entire period the returns to colonial FDI (5.4 % in 1919–1938) were about a factor 2.5 higher than returns to investment in the Dutch domestic economy (2.1 % in 1920–1939). We argue that these returns should be interpreted in a colonial context of systematic labour repression, but that they may also partly reflect a higher risk-premium of investments in colonial commodities.