Populism may seem like it has come out of nowhere, but it has been on the rise for a while. I argue that economic history and economic theory both provide ample grounds for anticipating that advanced stages of economic globalization would produce a political backlash. While the backlash may have...

This paper opens with a discussion of the types of institutions that allow markets to perform adequately. While we can identify in broad terms what these are, there is no unique mapping between markets and the non-market institutions that underpin them. The paper emphasizes the importance of...

Do countries with lower policy-induced barriers to international trade grow faster, once other relevant country characteristics are controlled for? There exists a large empirical literature providing an affirmative answer to this question. We argue that methodological problems with the empirical...

Unlike most cross-country growth analyses, we focus on turning points in growth performance. We look for instances of rapid acceleration in economic growth that are sustained for at least eight years and identify more than 80 such episodes since the 1950s. Growth accelerations tend to be...

Most conventional accounts of India's recent economic performance associate the pick-up in economic growth with the liberalization of 1991. This paper demonstrates that the transition to high growth occured around 1980, a full decade before economic liberalization. We investigate a number of...

This is an attempt to derive broad, strategic lessons from the diverse experience with economic growth in last fifty years. The paper revolves around two key arguments. One is that neoclassical economic analysis is a lot more flexible than its practitioners in the policy domain have generally...

We estimate the respective contributions of institutions, geography, and trade in determining income levels around the world, using recently developed instruments for institutions and trade. Our results indicate that the quality of institutions trumps' everything else. Once institutions are...

We consider a model of policy choice in which appropriate policies depend on a country's own circumstances, but the presence of a successful leader generates an informational externality and results in too little 'policy experimentation.' Corrupt governments are reined in while honest...

This study focuses on the role of trade and trade policy in achieving sustained long-term growth in Africa. One major conclusion is that trade policy in Sub-Saharan Africa works much the same way that it does elsewhere. High levels of trade restrictions have been an important obstacle to exports...

This paper argues that domestic social conflicts are a key to understanding why growth rates lack persistence and why so many countries have experienced a growth collapse after the mid-1970s. It emphasizes conflicts interact with external shocks on the one hand, and the domestic institutions of...