Journal ArticleDOI
Africa's Growth Tragedy: Policies and Ethnic Divisions
William Easterly,Ross Levine +1 more
TLDR
This article showed that ethnic diversity helps explain cross-country differences in public policies and other economic indicators in Sub-Saharan Africa, and that high ethnic fragmentation explains a significant part of most of these characteristics.Abstract:
Explaining cross-country differences in growth rates requires not only an understanding of the link between growth and public policies, but also an understanding of why countries choose different public policies. This paper shows that ethnic diversity helps explain cross-country differences in public policies and other economic indicators. In the case of Sub-Saharan Africa, economic growth is associated with low schooling, political instability, underdeveloped financial systems, distorted foreign exchange markets, high government deficits, and insufficient infrastructure. Africa's high ethnic fragmentation explains a significant part of most of these characteristics.read more
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical Investigation
TL;DR: Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson as discussed by the authors used estimates of potential European settler mortality as an instrument for institutional variation in former European colonies today, and they followed the lead of Curtin who compiled data on the death rates faced by European soldiers in various overseas postings.
Journal ArticleDOI
Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War
James D. Fearon,David D. Laitin +1 more
TL;DR: This article showed that the current prevalence of internal war is mainly the result of a steady accumulation of protracted conflicts since the 1950s and 1960s rather than a sudden change associated with a new, post-Cold War international system.
Journal ArticleDOI
The quality of government
TL;DR: The authors investigated empirically the determinants of the quality of governments in a large cross-section of countries and found that countries that are poor, close to the equator, ethnolinguistically heterogeneous, use French or socialist laws, or have high proportions of Catholics or Muslims exhibit inferior government performance.
Posted Content
Greed and Grievance in Civil War
Paul Collier,Anke Hoeffler +1 more
TL;DR: Collier and Hoeffler as discussed by the authors compare two contrasting motivations for rebellion: greed and grievance, and show that many rebellions are linked to the capture of resources (such as diamonds in Angola and Sierra Leone, drugs in Colombia, and timber in Cambodia).
Posted Content
Financial Intermediation and Growth: Causality and Causes
TL;DR: In this article, the authors evaluate whether the level of development of financial intermediaries exerts a casual influence on economic growth, and they find that financial intermediary development has a large causal impact on growth.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI
Why Do Different Countries Choose a Different Public-Private Mix of Educational Services?
TL;DR: In this article, a wide range across countries in the percentage of total enrollments that attend private rather than public schools is observed, and it is hypothesized that the large %PVT at the secondary level in developing countries is hypothesized to stem from limited public spending, which creates an excess demand from people who would prefer to use the public schools but are involuntarily excluded and pushed into the private sector.
Book
The Vampire State in Africa: The Political Economy of Decline in Ghana
Abstract: Part I - theories of development and decline: development theory and the African experience the evolution of economic development theory and policy in Ghana a theory of economic decline. Part II - Ghana's economy in the 20th century: the colonial economy development in the post-war indigenous state the political economy of decline 1961-1983. Part III - the failure of cocoa: an economic analysis of the cocoa industry implications for managing the economic recovery in Ghana.
ReportDOI
The Productivity of Nations
Robert E. Hall,Charles I. Jones +1 more
TL;DR: In this article, the authors investigate why some countries produce so much more output per worker than others, and propose a method to find out why workers produce more output in some countries than others.