Pre-colonial Determinants of Corruption in Africa
Abstract
Even though Africa hosts most of the naturally occurring resources, it remains the poorest continent. This idea is known as the resource curse and most authors have argued and focused on how colonial inheritance and decolonization strongly effects Africa's current economic stagnation that is mostly due to corruption, which is more prevalent in African institutions than any other continent. Unlike most research papers that have focused on decolonization and how it affects levels of corruption this paper instead takes the Afrocentric view that precolonial ancestral characteristics and social institutions explain the continued exploitation of African institutions by their leader's through corruption, which hinders economics growth and facilitates volatile political institutions. This paper find empirical results that African communities that depended on animal husbandry for subsidence have less corruption compared to agriculture intensive communities.
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