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 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, in particular, the manner in which social conflicts interact with external shocks on the...

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...

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 occurred around 1980, a full decade before economic liberalization. We investigate a number of...

The World Bank's The East Asian Miracle: Economic Growth and Public Policy makes official what East Asian specialists had long known: most of the high-performing Asian economies have had extensive government intervention, and some of these interventions, in the areas of credit and exports, have...

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...

There exists a positive correlation between an economy's exposure to international trade and the size of its government. The correlation holds for most measures of government spending, in low- as well as high-income samples, and is robust to the inclusion of a wide range of controls. One...

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...