Catching up: What are the Critical Factors for success?

This paper addresses one of the oldest and most controversial issues in economics: Why do some countries succeed in catching up, while others fall behind? In recent years the quality and availability of data on different aspects of development have improved a lot. Attempting to exploit this opportunity for more in-depth research the paper starts with an overview and assessment of the different approaches in the literature and the empirical indicators and methods that these have given rise to. This leads to the formulation of a synthetic empirical model and, with the help of factor analysis on large variable set, to the identification of set of “capabilities” which might be assumed to be of critical importance for catch up. The explanatory power of these capabilities for economic growth is tested on a sample of 135 countries in the 1990s.