The Interplay Between Colonial History and Postcolonial Institutions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract We study the long-term impacts of Cameroon’s colonial history and its interplay with postcolonial institutions. We exploit both the arbitrary division of the German Colony of Kamerun between France and Britain after the First World War and the 1961 reunification of British Southern Cameroons and French Cameroon. Comparing individuals from the same ethnic homeland but living on either side of the British-French border within Cameroon, we find that individuals on the British side had higher educational attainment before the reunification, but that this initial advantage was partially erased by post-reunification governance. Despite achieving higher educational attainment overall, individuals on the British side have worse employment outcomes and roughly similar infant mortality rates. We provide further evidence of the interaction between colonial origins and postcolonial institutions by analyzing how the outcomes of individuals in former Southern Cameroons differ from their hypothetical outcomes, had they instead opted to join Nigeria in the 1961 plebiscite. We find that they have lower educational attainment, higher infant mortality rates, and worse employment outcomes relative to their co-ethnics living on the Nigerian side of the border between Southern Cameroons and Nigeria.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".