Despite the advances the world has made toward technology an

Despite the advances the world has made toward technology and science, much of the world\'s population still lives in extreme poverty. A majority of those who live in poverty are in countries which were former European colonies.

Please respond to all of the following prompts:

Explain the effects of colonial legacy on the development of states which were former colonies.

Discuss the factors that have affected their development. Use examples to illustrate your analysis.

Solution

1)

To study the effects of colonial legacy, we focus on one case, the West African nation of Cameroon. Originally colonized by Germany, Cameroon was divided between Britain and France during World War I, and the two powers implemented widely divergent colonial policies in their separate zones. The two areas were only reunited at independence in 1960, and despite a strong policy of centralization, they retain separate legal and education systems and a strong attachment to the language and culture of their respective colonizers. A comparison of these regions thus permits an excellent test of the colonizer influence hypothesis. The regions became British and French colonies due to an exogenous shock unrelated to local conditions (i.e., the German defeat in WW I), and they have similar post-independence histories. And while there might be differences in preexisting conditions across these regions, these differences are unlikely to be pronounced at the arbitrary internal boundary between them. Hence, we can use a regression discontinuity research design to identify the effects of colonial legacy. The use of a single case keeps us from examining within-colonizer variation, but we will argue that the strategies pursued by the British and French and Cameroon present a “hard case” for the hypothesis of British superiority.