Beginning in the 1990s, an institutional perspective on development has become increasingly prominent in development thinking, captured in the mantra, “Institutions Matter,” or “Governance Matters.” Based on the assumption that “institutions matter”, there has been a massive surge in...

For scholars of Africa's political economy, an important problem has been explaining and understanding how a country escapes rule by criminals and warlords and instead comes to be directed by a set of lower-key kleptocrats who operate within a set of institutions which on the whole promote...

Economic self-interest and social considerations are the key determinants of public support for market reforms in transition countries. However, political strategies that rely mainly on public support for pushing through economic reforms have limited relevance if the prevailing institutional...

Growth empirics with institutional measures is performed for 25 transition countries overthe period 1990-95. Estimation results suggest that (particularly state) institutions aresignificant for growth and, especially, foreign direct investment (FDI), the latter in turnbeing important for the...

We explain economic growth by both politics, i.e. government activity including spending as well as regulation, and institutional quality and its interaction with politics. This extends previous work on institution building in transition by looking at its impact and, at the same time,...

In the wake of the global financial crisis that began in 1997, an influential body of opinionarose which argued that a primary cause of the crisis in the affected countries was a lack ofinstitutional transparency and accountability, and more generally, an absence of the rule of law. Thisargument...