Abstract

Maritime fisheries in African coastal regions play an important role as a driver of economic and social development. Africa is also a highly fractionalized country and deeply-rooted ethnic institutions play a major role on how natural resources are managed. This paper constructs a novel panel dataset, which combines information on fish production with regional variation in economic activity. We use satellite data on nighttime light intensity to analyze the impact of a climatic shock to fish production on subnational economic activity in 812 coastal regions from 31 African countries for 1992 to 2007. We address endogeneity by instrumenting fish production with yearly variation in sea-surface temperature. We find that a 10 % increase in fish production leads to a 3 % increase in contemporary regional economic activity. Further, we present evidence of the importance of pre-colonial political centralization on a regions vulnerability to contemporary negative climatic shocks to fisheries. In particular, we find that a decrease in regional economic activity due to a negative climatic shock to fish production is mitigated by up to 80 % in societies with strong pre-colonial political centralization.