Marlous van Waijenburg

This paper presents the hitherto largest historical dataset of skill-premiums for Sub-Saharan Africa and Southern and Eastern Asia, tracing long-term trends in relative prices of labor skills back from the 1870s up to the early 21^st century. Our series reveal three new stylized facts that so far have gone unnoticed in the development literature. First, we show that skilled artisanal and white-collar labor tended to be far more expensive in Africa and Asia on the eve of the global schooling revolution than it had been in pre-industrial Europe. Second, our series reveal that the relative price of skills was on average much higher in Africa than in Asia. Finally, we document a dramatic free-fall in skill-premiums during the 20^th century in both regions, ultimately converging to levels long witnessed in the early industrializers. While the timing and intensity of the decline in skill-premiums varied from place to place, the free-fall was universal. We explore why the relative price for skilled workers around 1900 were so much higher in Africa than in Asia and why these price gaps converged so rapidly in the course of the 20^th century.

Professor van Waijenburg’s research focuses on the historical roots of relative African poverty and state fragility. Where sufficiently reliable and comparable records exist, she creates new datasets from a range of qualitative and quantitative archival sources. The construction of economic indicators for periods where standardized data for Africa is generally lacking (usually pre-1960), has three major cross-disciplinary payoffs. First, these new empirical foundations allow us to scrutinize a number of deep-seated (mis)conceptions about Africa’s political and economic past. Second, data over longer time periods can reveal a number of slower moving changes that have taken place in African economies. And finally, such historical datasets better embed ‘Africa’s path’ in debates about the making of global economic inequality.

Her first book (in progress) analyzes the comparative nature and pace of colonial state-building efforts in Africa through the lens of taxation. Drawing on extensive archival work in Aix-en-Provence, Dakar, London, and Washington D.C., she constructed a public finance dataset that is comparable across time and space for nearly 30 British and French African colonies. This macro-perspective allows her to scrutinize contradicting narratives about colonial fiscal ambitions, to identify similarities and differences in colonizers’ strategies to fiscal and state capacity building, and to measure and explain the incidence of widely varying tax-payer burdens across colonial Africa. Most importantly, her analysis incorporates the “invisible” component of colonial public finance: the in-kind revenues that accrued to the state from forced labor practices. This dimension sets her study apart from an expanding and cross-disciplinary body of literature on historical tax systems. By approaching forced labor from a fiscal perspective, she not only seeks to broaden the conceptual framework of the historical ‘fiscal capacity building’ literature, but also to shed new light on the multifaceted role of colonial labor coercion practices.