Early states like China, India, Italy and Greece have been experiencing more rapid economic growth in recent decades than have later-comers to agriculture and statehood like New Guinea, the Congo, and Uruguay. We show that more rapid growth by early starters has been the norm in economic...

A large body of research on India’s rapid economic growth since 1991 also documents increasing regional disparities. In this paper, we use unsaturated night light data to challenge this dominant narrative of unequal growth. For 520 districts spanning a 15 year period (1996-2010), we find...