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ewout frankema
Wageningen University, Department of Social Sciences, Faculty Member
- Ewout Frankema is professor and chair of Rural and Environmental History at Wageningen University. He studied History... moreEwout Frankema is professor and chair of Rural and Environmental History at Wageningen University. He studied History, Economics and Philosophy at the University of Groningen, where he obtained his PhD in Economics in 2008. He has taught a broad range of history and economics courses at the University of Groningen, Utrecht University and Wageningen University. His research agenda focuses on a deeper understanding of the long-term comparative economic development of developing regions (Africa, Latin America, Asia) and the historical origins and nature of present-day global inequality. He is currently visiting fellow of the Economic History department of Lund University, elected member of the Young Academy of the Royal Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences and director of the African Economic History Network Textbook project.
In 2012 he was awarded a VIDI-grant by the Dutch Science Foundation for his project Is Poverty Destiny? Exploring Long Term Changes in African Living Standards in Global Perspective and a European Research Council Starting Grant for his project Is Poverty Destiny? A New Empirical Foundation of Long Term African Welfare Analysis.edit
We explore a new dataset of annual and monthly district-level rainfall patterns to assess the longstanding idea that climatological conditions were more conducive to the development of dense rural populations in Asia than in Africa. We... more
We explore a new dataset of annual and monthly district-level rainfall patterns to assess the longstanding idea that climatological conditions were more conducive to the development of dense rural populations in Asia than in Africa. We test whether there existed significant cross-regional differences in both the frequency and intensity of rainfall shocks (i.e. annual mean deviations exceeding one standard deviation). Our results confirm that rainfall shocks in tropical Africa were both more frequent and more severe. Second, we test the separate effects of precipitation levels and variability on district-level population densities from colonial population censuses. We hypothesize that higher mean levels of precipitation facilitate agricultural intensification and human settlement, while unpredictability of rainfall has the opposite effect. Controlling for average rainfall levels, we find a strong negative effect of rainfall variation on population densities. This study thus lends further support to a wide literature arguing that the ecological conditions of agricultural intensification were more challenging in the African than in the Asian tropics.
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The increasing use of missionary church records in studies of African human capital formation appears both promising and problematic. We engage with a recent article by Meier zu Selhausen and Weisdorf (2016) to show how selection biases... more
The increasing use of missionary church records in studies of African human capital formation appears both promising and problematic. We engage with a recent article by Meier zu Selhausen and Weisdorf (2016) to show how selection biases in church record data may provoke overly optimistic accounts of European influences on Africa’s schooling revolution. Confronting their dataset – drawn from the marriage registers of the Anglican ‘Namirembe Cathedral' in Kampala – with Uganda’s 1991 census, we show that trends in literacy and numeracy of people born in Kampala lagged half a century behind those who wedded in Namirembe Cathedral. We run a regression analysis on decadal birth cohorts (1910s-1960s) showing that ethnic, gender and locational educational inequalities persisted throughout the colonial era. We argue that European influences on access to schooling, new labour market opportunities and women’s emancipation in colonial Uganda were uneven and exclusionary, while being mediated and sustained through a political coalition of the British colonial administration with the Buganda Kingdom. We call for a more sensitive treatment of African realities in the evaluation of European colonial legacies.
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This paper assesses the long term evolution of wage inequality in Latin American countries during the twentieth century in an international co mparative framework. The main conclusion is that wage inequality in Latin America was compara... more
This paper assesses the long term evolution of wage inequality in Latin American countries during the twentieth century in an international co mparative framework. The main conclusion is that wage inequality in Latin America was compara tively modest during the first half of the twentieth century, but during the second half of th e century, and especially since the 1970's, wages diverged rapidly. This increase was a region- wide phenomenon. Important break points in the wage inequality trend appear to correspond w ith political regime changes. Yet, the ultimate causes of the wage inequality increase, so it is argued, can only be understood in relation to the great transformation in the relativ e supply of unskilled labour that has occurred in the course of the twentieth century.
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This is the first study to present a unified quantitative account of African commodity trade in the long 19th century from the zenith of the Atlantic slave trade (1790s) to the eve of World War II (1939). Drawing evidence from a new... more
This is the first study to present a unified quantitative account of African commodity trade in the long 19th century from the zenith of the Atlantic slave trade (1790s) to the eve of World War II (1939). Drawing evidence from a new dataset on export and import prices, volumes, composition and net barter terms of trade for five African regions, we show that Sub-Saharan Africa experienced a terms of trade boom that was comparable to other parts of the 'global periphery' from the late 18th century up to the mid-1880s, with an exceptionally sharp price boom in the four decades before the Berlin conference (1845-1885). We argue that this commodity price boom changed the economic context in favor of a European scramble for Africa. We also show that the accelerated export growth after the establishment of colonial rule deepened Africa's specialization in primary commodities, even though the terms of trade turned into a prolonged decline after 1885.
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At the eve of Latin American independence high levels of land inequality contrasted sharply to the egalitarian distribution of land in the northern regions of the United States. Land distribution is one of the key issues in the debate on... more
At the eve of Latin American independence high levels of land inequality contrasted sharply to the egalitarian distribution of land in the northern regions of the United States. Land distribution is one of the key issues in the debate on the determinants of the historical reversal of fortune in the American hemisphere. This debate primarily focuses on the relative importance of "factor endowments" versus "institutions" as initial conditions of long run post- independence development and stagnation. This paper assesses the colonial roots of Latin American land inequality in a global comparative perspective. I argue that we should take the "political economic context" into consideration if we want to explain the global cross-colony variation in land inequality. More specific, the argument is that redistribution of land depends on the relative influence several stakeholders are able to exert on the formation of related colonial policies of land distributio...
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Land inequality is one of the crucial underpinnings of long-run persistent wealth and asset inequality. This article assesses the colonial roots of land inequality from a comparative perspective. The evolution of land inequality is... more
Land inequality is one of the crucial underpinnings of long-run persistent wealth and asset inequality. This article assesses the colonial roots of land inequality from a comparative perspective. The evolution of land inequality is analysed in a cross-colonial multivariate regression framework complemented by an in-depth comparative
case study of three former British colonies: Malaysia, Sierra Leone, and Zambia. The main conclusion is that the literature tends to overemphasize the role of geography and to underestimate the role of pre-colonial institutions in shaping the colonial political economic context in which land is (re)distributed from natives to colonial settlers.
case study of three former British colonies: Malaysia, Sierra Leone, and Zambia. The main conclusion is that the literature tends to overemphasize the role of geography and to underestimate the role of pre-colonial institutions in shaping the colonial political economic context in which land is (re)distributed from natives to colonial settlers.
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This paper examines the state and scope of the study of economic history of developing regions, underlining the importance of knowledge of history for economic development. While the quality of the existing research on developing... more
This paper examines the state and scope of the study of economic history of developing regions, underlining the importance of knowledge of history for economic development. While the quality of the existing research on developing countries is impressive, the proportion of published research focusing on these regions is low. The dominance of economic history research on the North American and Western European success stories suggests the need for a forum for future research that contributes to our understanding of how institutions, path dependency, technological change and evolutionary processes shape economic growth in the developing parts of the world. Many valuable data sets and historical episodes relating to developing regions remain unexplored, and many interesting questions unanswered. This is exciting. Economic historians and other academics interested in the economic past have an opportunity to work to begin to unlock the complex reasons for differences in development, the factors behind economic disasters and the dynamics driving emerging success stories.
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The present paper introduces a new indicator of educational inequality, the grade distribution ratio (GDR), focusing on levels of grade repetition and drop out rates in primary and secondary education. The indicator is specifically... more
The present paper introduces a new indicator of educational inequality, the grade distribution ratio (GDR), focusing on levels of grade repetition and drop out rates in primary and secondary education. The indicator is specifically suitable to evaluate the distributive implications of expanding educational systems in developing countries. A comparative analysis of grade enrollment distributions across 92 developing countries from 1960 to 2005 reveals that the decline in educational inequality has been substantial and wide spread since 1960, but that progress has slowed down in the last two decades. Latin American countries were characterized by very large initial levels of educational inequality, but contrary to other developing regions continued to equalize their grade enrollment distribution in the last two decades.