Development of Undervelopment in Today's Undeveloped Countries

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This essay seeks to explain the various origins for underdevelopment especially in today’s underdeveloped nations. The slave trade theory is one of the dominant views on the historic root causes of the African underdevelopment. According to this view, Africa’s engagement in slave trade caused massive depopulation of the continent. According to the result of engagement in slave trade was a significant slowdown in division of labour, demographic transition, human capital accumulation and long-run economic growth. Depopulation also resulted into an implosion of the continent’s production possibility Frontier and an unambiguous reduction in welfare. The secular decline in welfare continued over more than two centuries plunging the continent into economic backwardness and today we are in this state because of slave trade. Furthermore, some Economists argue that the African countries with the biggest slave exports are by and large the countries with the lowest incomes now (based on per capita gross domestic product in 2000). This reduced the effective demand for most of the developing countries. This shows that slave trade prevented state development, encouraged ethnic fractionalisation and weakened legal institutions and through these channels it affected economic development. Long distance trade had some negative attributes that has contributed to the underdevelopment of developing countries. Initially Africa was developing along side with other continents but when the continent had contacts with Europe development was disturbed. Europeans came with useless things like beads, necklaces, salt to trade with todays underdeveloped countries and in return they got precious metals like Gold, diamond which left Africa in an awkward position. Furthermore, Africa’s integration into the world market following 1500 during the “protoglobalisation era” took on a perverted

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