Nicolas Suarez, an economist at Secretariat, together with Pascaline Dupas and Zhongyi Tang, present “A New Perspective on Spatial Heterogeneity in African Development”, which addresses the long standing debate on the effect of national institutions on development outcomes. 

The article introduces a newly constructed, hyper localized dataset on development outcomes for the African continent, generated by combining machine learning techniques with satellite imagery and Afrobarometer survey data.

Using this dataset, the authors examine how national institutions shape development across pre-colonial ethnic group territories divided by modern national borders. Their analysis finds that areas located in countries with higher institutional quality exhibit higher levels of infrastructure access, with positive but more modest estimates than earlier country level studies, helping reconcile previously conflicting findings in the development economics literature.

To learn more about the study’s data, methodology, and application please reach out to Nicolas Suarez.