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State reach and development in Africa since the 1960s: new data and analysis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 November 2021

Carl Müller-Crepon Open the ORCID record for Carl Müller-Crepon [Opens in a new window]
Carl Müller-Crepon*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science and International Relations, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
*
Corresponding author. Email: carl.muller-crepon@politics.ox.ac.uk
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Abstract

Prominent arguments hold that African states’ geography limits state capacity, impedes public service provision, and slows economic development. To test this argument, I collect comprehensive panel data on a proxy of local state capacity, travel times to national and regional capitals. These are computed on a yearly 5 × 5 km grid using time-varying data on roads and administrative units (1966–2016). I use these data to estimate the effect of changes in travel times to capitals on local education provision, infant mortality rates, and nightlight emissions. Within the same location, decreases in travel times to its capitals are robustly associated with improved development outcomes. The article advances the measurement of state capacity and contributes to understanding its effects on human welfare.

Keywords

Data collection
Type
Research Note
Information
Political Science Research and Methods , Volume 11 , Issue 3 , July 2023 , pp. 663 - 672
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the European Political Science Association

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Supplementary material: Link

Müller-Crepon Dataset

Dataset

https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/BM4WW0
Link
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Müller-Crepon supplementary material

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