carl-mc/state_reach_africa

Spatial state reach data for African states since independence, based on travel times to national and regional capitals ## Description Prominent arguments hold that African states’ geography limits state capacity, impedes public service provision, and slows economic development. This repository contains comprehensive panel data on a proxy of local state capacity, travel times to national and regional capitals. These are computed on a yearly 5 x 5km grid using time-varying data on roads (since 1966) and administrative units (1945–2016). The road data has been digitized using a convolutional neural network from a collection of Michelin maps that cover the African continent at 23 points in time since 1966. Data on administrative units, their capitals, and borders has been self-collected, drawing on public sources such as statoids.org, FAO’s GAUL database, and the GADM data. **The data is also available for download from this Dropbox:** See README.Rmd for details on how to load the data (in R). When using the data, please cite the following publications and refer to them for further details: Müller-Crepon, Carl. (2021) State Reach and Development in Africa since the 1960s: New Data and Analysis. *Political Science Research and Methods:* FirstView. (presents the main data) Working Paper version here. Müller-Crepon, Carl, Philipp Hunziker & Lars-Erik Cederman (2021). Roads to Rule, Roads to Rebellion: Relational State Capacity and Conflict in Africa. *Journal of Conflict Resolution, 65*(2-3), 563-590. (presents the original road digitization) ## Data ### 1st Level Administrative Units (a.k.a. Regions) GIS data for 1st level administrative units of independent African countries until 2016 are stored under data/admin\_units/africa\_regions\_panel.GeoJSON . Each geometry corresponds to one administrative unit which existed for a period indicated by the start and end years. ### State reach measure Because physical accessibility is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for state capacity, this data proxies local state reach via the travel times to a locations’ national and re …