Q&A with Esther Duflo

Q. To what degree do you believe that natural geography and colonialism play a role in development?

Mitch Vidovich
United States

A. There is a lot of very good work which suggests that long-term factors, such as geography and colonialism, do play a role in development. Jeffrey Sachs has made the point about geography most forcefully (being landlocked, or being malaria-prone, places a huge burden on countries). Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and Jim Robinson on the one hand, and Andrei Shleifer and his co-authors on the other hand, have made the point about the long-term impacts of colonialism, although they have emphasized somewhat different channels.

There is also a recent new wave of work using more localized and microeconomic data that confirms the broad pattern these authors found when comparing countries with different experiences. For example, two recent papers exploit malaria eradication campaigns to estimate the impact of malaria on productivity. Both find long-term effects of having been exposed to malaria in childhood on wage and education in several countries (Hoyt Bleakley and Adrienne Lucas), even though the implied effect on GDP is not nearly as large as what Jeffrey Sachs had estimated previously. On colonialism, articles by Abhijit Banerjee and Lakshmi Iyer, Lakshmi Iyer, and Melissa Dell have shown that even within-country variations in colonial institutions continue to matter for the development of these regions today.

There is a lively debate on what matters more: history, or geography? I think this debate may not be the most important, though. Whether history or geography, these are very long-term factors that we cannot do much about. Sometimes, as Daron Acemoglu’s work has shown, geography actually is a factor in history. The more urgent question is, what can be done in countries that have the misfortune to start with a loaded colonial history or a really poor geography? What policies are effective in these countries to fight poverty and foster development? This is where we need to look at specific policies with a careful lens, and see what comes out of it.

In this sense, the papers on malaria I just cited are very interesting, since they look at the consequences of a concerted effort to fight malaria (mainly by spraying DDT). And they showed that the effort was successful, and that it had positive impacts on education and productivity down the road. Not only have we learnt that malaria is indeed bad, but we have some idea of how to go about solving this problem. We need more work like that.