Three Essays on French Colonial Trade Patterns

The work mainly investigates how the colonial strategy through the settlement decision affected French trade patterns. It also provides a framework to discuss different factors through which European settlements might have affected the French trade pattern with colonies, namely, the establishment of formal institutions, the use of common language with Europeans and the duration of colonization. In its next part, the work investigates the relation between the type of goods colonies exported to France and those economies' later development. A common explanation attributed to the export-growth nexus is the quality of institutions established in those colonies during the colonial period.