Last European coloniser

Last European coloniser

Which European power last ruled the country, for 159 countries. It is a single fixed fact, not a series over time. It is one of the most-cited explanations for why countries' institutions (their laws, courts and government) differ. It is also the reason this site wanted a way to carry a label at all. It records European colonisation and nothing else. A country marked as never a European colony may have been ruled for a long time by a power that was not European. Examples are Korea under Japan, much of the Balkans and the Middle East under the Ottomans, and Central Asia and the Caucasus under Russia and then the Soviet Union. Read the category as "no European ruler", not as "no empire". Sixty countries are not in the dataset at all. So a grouping by it compares 159 countries, not the whole world. Eight countries are marked as having been colonising powers themselves. That is a different kind of fact from the others in the same column. Keep it separate when reading any comparison across these groups.

What differs between the groups

The “between groups” figure runs from 0 (the groups are no different) to 1 (the groups explain all the differences between countries). Groups have no up or down, so this says how much the groups differ, never which way. For that, read the group averages. The figure also tends to rise when there are more groups. So to judge whether it could be chance (q), we shuffle the same labels among the same countries many times and see how often a figure this big turns up. Then we allow for the fact that many measures are checked at once, since with enough checks a few big figures turn up by luck alone. Groups with fewer than 12 countries are left out. And countries that share a label share a lot else. Adjusting for income rules out one third factor, but leaves language, region, legal tradition and history untouched.

The income rows are shown wherever they rank. Whether the groups differ in income is the question people most often bring to this table. They have no adjusted figure, since income cannot be adjusted for itself.

The groups, and who is in them

Largest first. A pair page shows the link within a group only if the group has at least twelve countries. So the smaller groups here appear on no pair page at all.

Source

All indicators · How the country data works