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linguistic fractionalisation (Mauro, 1995); differences in law systems (Porta et al., 1997, 1999); percentage of law students (Knack and Keefer, 1997), social infrastructure index (Hall and Jones, 1999); colonial origins (Rodrik, 1999); predicted trade shares (Rodrik et al., 2004) and settler mortality – the seminal contribution of Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson (2001). However, as Bardhan (2005) points out much attention has been made to finding the perfect instrument and less to actually establishing an adequate and satisfactory causal explanation.

More typically, controls for institutional quality take the form of constructed indices such as those from the World Bank Governance Indicators (Kaufmann, Kraay and Mastruzzi, 2009), the International Country Risk Guide (ICRG, published by Political and Risk Services) and the Polity IV dataset (Marshall, Gurr and Jaggers, 2013) amongst others. However, using composite indicators of institutions can be misleading – they are empirical indices that are limited in temporal coverage, subject to interpretation bias by the compilers and are subject to aggregation problems. These indices (as well as other constructed variables) fail to isolate the causal effect of any single institution, but at the same time cannot include the entire array of institutions that may affect growth for instance, which raises the issue of omitted variable bias (Pande & Udry, 2006). Perhaps a much stronger criticism lies with the fact that most indicators of institutions are invalid as they do not reflect institutions as inputs into production, rather they represent the outcomes that institutions are meant to effect (Glaeser et al., 2004; Fedderke et al., 2011). The variables created for the purposes of this analysis attempt in part to address these shortcomings, in particular the latter.

Of relevance to this analysis, the literature has also attempted to capture the underlying characteristics of indigenous groups, early state-structures and the effect of colonisation, all of which have been shown to be significant in the institutions-growth relationship. These include Morrison et al. (1989)’s characterisation of ‘state-like’ nature; Easterly and Levine’s (1997) index of ethno-linguistic fractionalisation; Gennaioli and Rainier (2007)’s measure of political organisation; Michalopoulos and Papaionnou (2011a, 2012)’s spatial distribution of African ethnicities and Easterly and Levine (2012)’s density of colonial European settlement1.

From the tax revenue perspective, in addition to more structural features of the economy, measures of the quality of governance and of political and legal institutions have been integrated into empirical models and been found to have positive and statistically significant effects. These include: political ‘voice and accountability’ (Bird, Martinez-Vasquez and Torgler, 2007), common law legal systems (Keen, 2012) and parliamentary systems of governance (Persson and Tabellini, 2003).

Pre-Colonial African Institutions

Fortes and Evans-Pritchard (1940) provides the basis for much of the work carried out on classifying political systems and administrative structure in pre-colonial Africa (prior to 1885). Their initial classification of political systems consisted of two main groups: primitive states and those considered stateless. Primitive states were本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。