Abstract Why has post-colonial Africa struggled to translate political independence into sustained economic development? This article argues that a critical but underappreciated factor is the structure of legal infrastructure connecting African economies to global capital markets. Conceptualizing law as economic infrastructure, we analyze how networks of bilateral tax and investment treaties allocate authority, shape interpretation, and enable enforcement of cross-border economic activity. Using network analysis, we show that Africa’s legal integration follows a U-shaped trajectory: high integration under colonial empires, sharp fragmentation after independence, and gradual reconstruction through bilateral treaties. Although treaty networks have expanded substantially since the 1970s, they reproduce hierarchical features of the colonial system through OECD-dominated model language and interpretive control. Within this networked hierarchy, certain jurisdictions – most notably Mauritius, the Netherlands, Belgium, and the United Arab Emirates – function as treaty hubs that bridge structural holes and expand African countries’ effective access to global investment networks. We provide empirical evidence that these network effects matter for development. An event-study analysis of 20 African countries adopting treaties with major hubs between 1990 and 2023 finds that GDP per capita rises by approximately 10–17 % within 3 to 5 years of adoption, with growth rates nearly doubling relative to preadoption trends. We find no evidence of adverse effects on poverty or maternal mortality. While causal inference is complicated by preexisting growth trends, the timing and magnitude of the effects are consistent with treaties amplifying development trajectories by reducing transaction costs and diversifying network access. The article contributes methodologically by applying network analysis to international legal infrastructure and substantively by reframing debates over tax and investment treaties. Rather than asking whether treaties are uniformly “good” or “bad” for development, we show that outcomes depend critically on network position, governance capacity, and access to rule-making institutions. The findings highlight both the developmental potential of treaty hubs and the missed opportunity of limited intra-African legal integration, with implications for Africa’s future strategies of economic and legal connectivity.
Morriss et al. (Wed,) studied this question.
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