In this paper we compare several historical scenarios very different one to each other both in institutional and geographical terms. What they have in common is the situation of relative poverty of most of the population. On the one part we are dealing with historical industrializing Catalonia...

The dismal growth performance of Africa is the worst economic tragedy of the XXth century. We document the evolution of per capita GDP for the continent as a whole and for subset of countries south of the Sahara desert. We document the worsening of various income inequality indexes and we...

Some natural resources—oil and minerals in particular—exert a negative and nonlinear impact on growth via their deleterious impact on institutional quality. We show this result to be very robust. The Nigerian experience provides telling confirmation of this aspect of natural resources. Waste...