15/09/2026 - LECL 61 - 12:45

Chun Chee Kok

(UCLouvain, LIDAM, CORE)

will give a presentation on 

The Missing Middlemen: Indian Expulsion and Rural Development in Uganda

Abstract: Governments across the developing world restrict or ban the traders who link farmers to markets, on the grounds that they capture margins that ought to accrue farmers. I study the 1972 expulsion of Uganda's ethnic Indian minority, a group under one percent of the population that held the commercial layer almost entirely, as an abrupt and total removal of agricultural intermediaries. I measure a locality's exposure to the pre-expulsion Indian commercial network using newly digitized 1969 census and road network data, and isolate quasi-random variation in exposure arising from the timing of a 1963--1974 road upgrading program, following Borusyak & Hull (2023). Four decades later, more-exposed localities produce significantly less agricultural output. Satellite vegetation indices show the gap already present in 1981 and unchanged through 2009, indicating a shift to a persistently lower level of production rather than a slower growth path. The loss is concentrated in crops grown for sale, with no effect on other crops, on input use, or on nighttime lights. For mechanism, more-exposed households are less likely to sell any crop and sell a smaller share of what they harvest. Among sellers, sales to traders fall while sales to other buyers do not. The commercial layer was never rebuilt over time, and suggestive evidence points to lower returns to entry arising from social stigma attached to trading activities, rather than to missing formal human capital. Altogether, removing intermediaries can persistently reduce agricultural output, and the vacancy needs not be filled.

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