Le Breton, Michel, Castañeda Dower, Paul, Gokmen, Gunes and Вебер, Шломо (2026) Did the Cold War Produce Development Clusters in Africa. Journal of Development Economics (n° 103776).

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Abstract

We examine the lasting impact of Cold War alignment on African development. To overcome the empirical challenge of ambiguous and interdependent international alliances during the Cold War, we introduce a non-cooperative game of social interactions. Using pre-determined, country-level characteristics to construct payoffs, we identify a unique two-bloc equilibrium partition of the continent. We then assign bloc alignments based on how the partition predicts UN voting patterns. Our empirical results indicate no income differences today between the Western and the Eastern blocs. However, their development paths reflect Cold War ideologies: Western-aligned African countries have greater inequality, financial development, and democracy, but lesser infrastructure, compared to Eastern-aligned ones.