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The Long Term Effects of the Printing Press in Sub-Saharan Africa

2013; RELX Group (Netherlands); Linguagem: Inglês

10.2139/ssrn.2294338

1556-5068

Culture, Economy, and Development Studies

This article delves into the relationship between newspaper readership and civic attitudes, and its e↵ect on economic development.To this end, we investigate the long-term consequences of the introduction of the printing press in the 19th century.In sub-Saharan Africa, Protestant missionaries were the first both to import the printing press technology and to allow the indigenous population to use it.We build a new geocoded dataset locating Protestant missions in 1903.This dataset includes, for each mission station, the geographic location and its characteristics, as well as the educational and health-related investments undertaken by the mission.We show that, within regions located close to missions, proximity to a printing press significantly increases newspaper readership today.We also document a strong association between proximity to a printing press and contemporary economic development.Our results are robust to a variety of identification strategies.