Our article presents an index of institutional complementarity for 27 postcommunist economies, and evaluates a key claim of the Varieties of Capitalism paradigm. The empirical novelty of the index lies in its integration of informal institutions as well as its combination of macro-level and...

Based on the variable rate of gross domestic product per capita growth and its sources, this paper first identifies five phases of economic development that are common to China, Japan, and Korea: M (Malthusian), G (government-led), K (à la Kuznets), H (human capital based) and PD (post...

This essay first provides a game-theoretic, endogenous view of institutions, and then applies the idea to identify sources of institutional trajectories of economic development in China, Japan, and Korea. It stylizes the Malthusian-phase of the East Asian economies as a peasant-based economy in...

This paper focuses on the epistemic importance played by ‘narratives' in economic analysis and their role in enhancing economic growth, discussing the case of India's own ‘growth narrative' emerging from the late 1980s. A closer study of the role of ‘narratives' in economic analysis offers...

The GDP growth rates recorded during the first 15 years of Indian planning are far higher than those recorded during the colonial era. The prevalent view amongst economists, therefore, is that the introduction of central economic planning caused a significant improvement in India's economic...

In recent decades, neo-mercantilism has become a fashionable trend. The appeal of an export-led growth regime is often explained based on the material interests of the domestic growth coalition. This article offers an alternative explanation based on the geopolitical territorial interests of the...

This paper investigates the empirical role of violent conflicts for the causal effect of democracy on economic growth. Exploiting within-country variation to identify the effect of democratization during the "Third Wave", we find evidence that the effect of democratization is weaker than...

Ratings of institutional quality are widely known and used in academic literature. Among such ratings are some whose compilation procedure took decades to perfect. Dozens of assessments have been accumulated, pertaining to a large and growing list of countries. These ratings use expert...