%0 Thesis
%9 Master
%A Wieringa, Niels
%D 2021
%F theses_frw:3691
%P 44
%T Neocolonialism: Resource extraction and the global distribution of wealth.
%U https://frw.studenttheses.ub.rug.nl/3691/
%X Literature on postcolonial economic development consists of a considerable variation of school of  thought. One of the theories, that of neocolonialism, has not seen as much academic consideration as  the rest. Meanwhile, recent findings in postcolonial economic development have increased the  focus on the role of historical colonialism in present-day unequal economic development This, along  with other perspectives on global inequality, have some conceptual ties to the neocolonial thesis. In  addition, due to developments such as the Chinese belt-and-road initiative, the term has seen a  resurgence in the media. For these reasons, this thesis aims to re-evaluate neocolonialism as an  explanation for the global distribution of wealth. It does so with a statistical analysis of the idea that  the continuation of colonial-era economic relations, centered around resource extraction, could  explain the current global distribution of wealth. Statistical analysis shows that the neocolonial model  is not very good at explaining resource dependency, but the same model does explain GDP variance.