We consider whether Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries are mainly poor because they are governed worse than other countries, as suggested by recent studies on the supremacy of institutions. Our empirical results show that the supremacy of institutions does not hold. SSA countries appear to face...

This article examines the strategies, successes and failures of economic development in Latin America since 1870. We divide the analysis into four key development phases: primary export-led growth (1870–1929), import substitution industrialisation (1945–82), debt crisis (1980s) and...

I reconsider the primacy of institutions over geography as an explanatory factor of cross-country differences in economic performance, which has recently been postulated by Acemoglu et al. (2001) and others. My estimates show that the reported missing direct performance effects of a measure of...