The Impact of Colonization on Home Country Wealth

Abstract

In this paper, a model is developed to estimate the impact of conquering and colonizing other countries on the per capita income of the mother or metropole country. The estimated impacts of the model are positive and quite large, the increases running between 14.2 and 78.3 percent of the total average income. While the omission of certain variables could have biased the results, the employment of Bayesian techniques indicates that the results are insensitive to the use of a large number of model specifications.