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
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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).
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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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Fiscal Policy and Economic Growth: An Empirical Investigation
William Easterly,Sergio Rebelo +1 more
TL;DR: In this paper, the empirical regularities relating fiscal policy variables, the level of development and the rate of growth are described, and they employ historical data, recent cross-section data, and newly constructed public investment series.
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International Comparisons of Educational Attainment
Robert J. Barro,Jong-Wha Lee +1 more
TL;DR: In this article, the authors describe a data set on educational attainment for 129 countries over five-year periods from 1960 to 1985, and provide a rough breakdown into incomplete and complete attainment at the three levels of schooling.
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Law and Finance
TL;DR: This paper examined legal rules covering protection of corporate shareholders and creditors, the origin of these rules, and the quality of their enforcement in 49 countries and found that common law countries generally have the strongest, and french civil law countries the weakest, legal protections of investors, with German and Scandinavian countries located in the middle.
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Political Instability and Economic Growth
TL;DR: In this article, the authors investigated the relationship between political instability and per capita GDP growth in a sample of 113 countries for the period 1950 through 1982 and found that in countries and time periods with a high propensity of government collapse, growth is significantly lower than otherwise.
Journal ArticleDOI
On the Number and Size of Nations
Alberto Alesina,Enrico Spolaore +1 more
TL;DR: In this article, the authors studied the equilibrium determination of the number of countries in different political regimes, and in different economic environments, with more or less economic integration, focusing on the trade-off between the benefits of large jurisdictions and the costs of heterogeneity of large and diverse populations.