Economic Growth & Colonized Islands
In new research, James Feyrer and Bruce Sacerdote (”Colonialism and Modern Income — Islands as Natural Experiments“) consider the effect the length of European colonization on the current standard of living of 80 tiny, isolated islands that have not previously been used in cross-country comparisons.
The longer one of the islands spent as a colony, the higher its present-day living standards and the lower its infant mortality rate. Each additional century of European colonization is associated with a 40% boost in income today and a reduction in infant mortality of 2.6 deaths per 1,000 births.
Before the Enlightenment, Europeans tended to view natives as savages who were better off dead than not baptized. After about 1700, however, attitudes began to change. When the authors divide the islands into those that were colonized in the centuries before 1700 and those that were colonized after, current island income is 64% higher per century for the post-Enlightenment group but only 11% higher per century for the pre-Enlightenment one. And the effects don’t appear to stem from the replacement of decimated low-income native populations with higher-income Europeans.
The authors also compare the experiences of separate Pacific islands with eight different colonizers. The islands that are best off, in terms of income growth, are the ones that were colonized by the US — as in Guam and Puerto Rico. Next best is time spent as a Dutch, British, or French colony. At the bottom are the countries colonized by the Spanish and especially the Portuguese.