Mesfin Araya
Research assistant, Lund University
Research interests: Politics, history, and economic development
The Economic, Political, and Social history of Sub-Saharan Africa has always been my interest, and working for AFLIT, which I enjoy very much, Â gave me a great opportunity to develop my knowledge on the subject. As a project assistant, my main responsibility is collecting and processing data, and for the last two years, I have been working on Malawi, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.
Country Cases
Malawi, Zambia, and Zimbabwe share strong geographic, historic and economic ties. Their commonalities include being land locked facing high transportation costs and the colonial experience of governance by the British South Africa Company. Further, they have a history of integrated markets including large flows of labour migration and in the period 1953-63 they were joined in the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. However, they also represent three distinct types of colonial economies: the peasant based (Malawi), the mineral dependent (Zambia) and the settler society (Zimbabwe). In this comparative study, we investigate the three territories’ economic interaction as well as their varieties in long-term income inequality trends.