Growth, History or Institutions: What Explains State Fragility in Sub-Saharan Africa?

This paper explores the empirical determinants of state fragility in sub-Saharan Africa over the1992–2007 period. Our dataset includes those sub-Saharan countries for which we have informationon the distribution by quintiles of the World Bank Country Policy and Institutional Assessment(CPIA) ratings. We evaluate the potential influence on fragility of a wide range of economic,institutional, and historical variables. Among economic factors, we consider per-capita GDP, bothin levels and growth rates, investment, natural resources, and schooling. We also consider economicpolicy variables such as government expenditures, trade openness, and inflation. Demographicforces are accounted for through the fertility rate, life expectancy, and the youth bulge. Institutionalfactors are captured by measures of ethnic fractionalization, civil liberties, revolutions, andconflicts, as well as governance indicators. Moreover, we select historical variables that reflect thecolonial experience of the region, namely the national identity of the colonizers and the politicalstatus during the colonial period. Finally, we account for geographic factors such as latitude, accessto sea, and the presence of fragile neighbors. Our central findings is that institutions are the maindeterminants of fragility: even after controlling for reverse causality and omitted variable bias, theprobability for a country to be fragile increases with restrictions of civil liberties and with thenumber of revolutions. Before controlling for endogeneity, economic factors such as per-capitaGDP growth and investment show some explanatory power, but economic prosperity displays acontradictory net impact since growth reduces fragility while investment facilitates it. Moreover,instrumental variables estimates show that per-capita GDP growth is no longer a significant factor.Colonial variables display a marginal residual influence: after controlling for all other factorsformer colonies are actually associated with a lower probability of being fragile.