We know a lot about what kinds of policies are needed to support the development of productive sectors, but much less about why governments pursue these policies and why some governments achieve better outcomes than others. The paper reviews the many but disparate arguments on the comparative...

We obtain time series estimates of the long run growth rates of 17 OECD countries, and test the hypothesis that these are the same across countries. We find that we cannot reject this hypothesis for the first and last three decades of the 20th century. We conclude that: (i) there are few, if...

Dictatorship is the predominant political system in many developing countries. However, different dictators act quite differently: a good dictator implements growth-enhancing economic policies, e.g. investment in public education and infrastructure, whereas a bad dictator expropriates wealth of...