Christianization without economic development: Evidence from missions in Ghana

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2021.07.015Get rights and content
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Abstract

One of the most powerful cultural transformations of the 20th century has been the dramatic expansion of Christianity outside of Europe. This unique historical process was facilitated by vast Christian missionary efforts. In this paper, we study the economic effects of Christian missions in Ghana. We rely on six distinct identification strategies that exploit exogenous variations in Christian missionary expansion from 1828 to 1932. We find no association between Christian missions, whether Protestant, Catholic, Presbyterian or Methodist, and local economic development, whether during contemporary or colonial times. However, some results suggest that Christian missions might have had a positive effect on human capital formation. There might thus be contexts in which missions promoted human capital accumulation without this necessarily translating into local economic development.

Keywords

Economics of religion
Religious diffusion
Path dependence
Long-term economic development
Christian missions
Christianity
Africa

JEL classification

Z12
N3
N37
N97
O15
O112
I25

Cited by (0)

1

This work was supported by the Open Access Publishing Fund of the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano. We thank Daniela Puzzello, three anonymous referees, Rossella Calvi, Jean-Paul Carvalho, Larry Iannaccone, Jared Rubin and Rohit Ticku for helpful comments. We are grateful to Prince Young Aboagye, Leigh Gardner, and Holger Weiss for kindly sharing data. Meier zu Selhausen gratefully acknowledges financial support from the British Academy (Postdoctoral Fellowship no. pf160051 - Conversion out of Poverty? Exploring the Origins and Long-Term Consequences of Christian Missionary Activities in Africa).