NONSO OBIKILI
African. Economist. Plus other things
Subscribe to my blog at nonso2.substack.com

Education

Ph.D. Economics
State University of New York at Binghamton

Binghamton NY, USA

M.A. Economics
State University of New York at Binghamton

Binghamton NY, USA

B. Sc. Economics
University of Port Harcourt

Port Harcourt, NG


Employment

ECONOMIST
United Nations
Development Coordination Officer - Economist

Abuja - Nigeria

Center for Global Development
Non-Resident Fellow

Washington DC - USA

Department of Economics - Stellenbosch University
Research Associate

Stellenbosch - South Africa

Turgot Centre for Economics and Policy Research
Director

Abuja - Nigeria

Economic Research Southern Africa
Policy Associate

Cape Town - South Africa

American University
WARA Residency Fellow

Washington DC - USA

African Heritage Institution
Director of Applied Economics

Enugu - Nigeria

State University of New York at Binghamton
Adjunct Professor

Binghamton University NY - USA

Central Bank of Nigeria
Research Assistant

Abuja - Nigeria

COLUMNIST
Business Day Nigeria
Chief Economist

Lagos - Nigeria

Guardian Nigeria
Contributor

Lagos - NIgeria

CONSULTING
Control Risks

London - United Kingdom

Enhancing Financial Innovation & Access (EFInA)

Abuja - Nigeria

First Bank of Nigeria

Lagos - Nigeria

Good Governance Africa (GGA)

Abuja - Nigeria

National Competitiveness Council of Nigeria (NCCN)

Lagos - Nigeria

National Treasury

Pretoria - South Africa

Nextier Advisory

Abuja - Nigeria

Oxford Analytica

London - United Kingdom

Partnership to Engage Reform and Learn (PERL)

Abuja - Nigeria

Public and Private Development Centre (PPDC)

Abuja - Nigeria

Sofala Partners

London - United Kingdom

United Nations University - World Institute for Development Economics Research

Helsinki - Finland

WNT Capitas

Lagos - Nigeria


Research

PUBLICATIONS
On Exchange Rate Policy Independence: Experiences from West Africa

Journal of Development Perspectives

2020

READ
Emigration and education: the schooling of the left behind in Nigeria

with Biniam Bedasso and Ermias Gebru

Migration and Development

2020

READ
Decolonizing with data: Cliometrics in Africa

with Johan Fourie

Handbook of Cliometrics

2019

READ
The impact of political competition on economic growth: evidence from municipalities in South Africa

South African Journal of Economics

2019

READ
State Formation in Precolonial Nigeria

The Oxford Handbook of Nigerian Politics

2018

READ
Fiscal Policy During Boom and Bust

with Kingsley Moghalu

The Oxford Handbook of Nigerian Politics

2018

READ
Markups and concentration in South African manufacturing sectors

with Johannes Fedderke and Nicola Viegi

South African Journal of Economics

2017

READ
The trans-Atlantic slave trades and local political fragmentation in Africa

Economic History Review

2016

READ
The impact of the slave trade on literacy in Africa: evidence from the colonial era

Journal of African Economies

2016

READ
A dream deffered: the microfoundations of direct political action in pre- and post-democratization South Africa"

with Biniam Bedasso

Journal of Development Studies

2016

READ
An examination of subnational growth in Nigeria: 1999 - 2012

South African Journal of Economics

2015

READ
Social capital and human capital in the colonies: a study of cocoa farmers in Western Nigeria

Economic History of Developing Regions

2015

READ
The introduction of higher banknotes and the price level in Nigeria

with E. N. Egbuna

International Journal of Economics and Finance

2013

READ
WORKING PAPERS
Tubers and its Role in Historic Political Fragmentation in Africa

REPEC

2022

READ
Unfilfilled Expectations and Populist Politics: Examining the Emergence of the EFF in South Africa

Economic Research Southern Africa no. 722

2017

READ
Human capital inequality and electoral outcomes in South Africa

with Biniam Bedasso

UNU-WIDER Working Paper No. 2016/100

2017

READ
Convict Labor and the Costs of Colonial Infrastructure:Evidence from Prisons in British Nigeria 1920-1938

with Belinda Archibong

Columbia University Working Paper Series

2019

READ
WORKS IN PROGRESS
Before Formalization: Attitudes toward Government Taxation and Governance Alternatives in Lagos's Informal Sector

with Adrienne LeBas

Transaction costs collective benefits and selective incentives: A six-country randomized trial design to encourage formalization

with Adrienne LeBas + 24 others

Gender and the Transmission of European Social Norms in Africa

with Grieve Chelwa

Trust and Punishment: Long-Term Impacts of Colonial Prisons and Labor Coercion on Trust in Nigeria

with Belinda Archibong

When Women March: The 1929 Aba Women’s Tax Revolt Prisons and Political Participation in Nigeria

with Belinda Archibong


Blog

New working paper alert: Tubers and its Role in Historic Political Fragmentation


New working paper alert: Tubers and its Role in Historic Political Fragmentation in Africa by myself @nonso2. Link: https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/113201/ What do tubers have to do with politics and political organization? A simplification.

Modern societies are organized in variants of this basic structure: People live in a country (the state) & are governed by some type of political structure. The structure funds itself by extracting value from people via taxes (mostly) & in exchange deliver some public goods.

Finance and money make this relatively easy nowadays (at least for some countries 😊). Whatever value is created is monetized and a share of that value is collected as taxes, and then used to administer the state.

However, imagine a hypothetical society 1000 years ago without money or finance, and mostly engaged in agriculture. Taxation and the functioning or existence of the state becomes more complicated. For the state to exist it needs to be able to extract value in some way.

As it turns out, what people choose to grow matters for the capacity of any structure to extract value. For instance, Scott in “Against the grain” argues that the emergence of states in Mesopotamia could not have happened w/out cereals & the relative ease of appropriability.

Mayshar et al provided evidence in the JPE earlier this year, that historically, groups that cultivated cereals were more likely to have more centralized states. This, they argue, is driven by the relative ease with which cereals could be appropriated and accumulated.

The question, however, is what happens to groups that don’t produce cereals? Do they just not develop centralized states? Or do they develop other types of political structures? In this paper, I argue that tuber cultivators instead move along a different political trajectory.

Summary: if surpluses -> power and surpluses are difficult to appropriate, then surpluses, and power, remain local. Even at the local level, since the surpluses & power, are difficult to appropriate, they remain distributed within local communities a.k.a. fragmentation.

I demonstrate this by first showing that tubers were not disadvantaged in their capacity to produce surpluses, or in supporting large populations. Indeed, more than half of the most densely populated groups were tuber cultivators.

Secondly, using Murdock’s ethnographic atlas and the SCCS, I show that tuber cultivators were more likely to have high level of political fragmentation, defined as the number of distinct groups in villages and town with some political authority.

I use a combination of the proximity to the likely location of the domestication of yams and the environmental conditions that define the potential caloric yield of yams vs cereals to identify the effect of tuber cultivation on fragmentation.

Of course, nowadays there is money and finance and almost every economic activity can be appropriated or taxed in the same way. So why does this historical relationship still matter? My answer is social norms.

I show that currently individuals who identify with tuber-cultivating groups are more likely to reject the accumulation of power by singular authorities, specifically, one-party rule, military rule, or rule by one man. No word on if they were likely to reject consensus.

These social norms continue to define the way in which people engage with the state, government, and politics. Anyway, this is a working paper and (emailed) comments and suggestions are welcome.

Read more

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