The paper tries to improve our understanding on the role of institutions in development by critically examining the current orthodox discourse on institutions and highlighting some of its key problems. After discussing some definitional problems, the chapter examines a number of problems in the...

Data on the growth performances of countries with similar comparative (dis)advantage and political institutions reveal a striking variation across world regions. While some former autocracies such as the East Asian growth miracles have done remarkably well, others such as the Latin American...

The Mexican land reform, one of the most sweeping in the world, proceeded in two steps: it granted peasants highly incomplete property rights on more than half of the Mexican territory starting in 1914, creating strong economic and political dependence for beneficiaries on the ruling political...

An elite derives its status from its relationship to property, whether physical or human capital. While stable property rights are necessary for everyday business, unstable property rights that result in major institutional changes (such as land reform) may have a positive impact on economic...

The paper revisits the policy debate on institutional reform approaches to property rights protection and empirically examines it in the context of FDI flows to the Middle East and Northern Africa region (MENA).Using panel data on 11 MENA countries for the period 1991-2007 and adopting feasible...

Recent research regarding property rights and economic development often treats property rights security in a country as homogeneous, although protecting the private entitlements of some can entail preventing others from claiming and controlling those same resources. This one-dimensional...

This paper studies the determinants of foreign land acquisition for large-scale agriculture. To do so, gravity models are estimated using data on bilateral investment relationships, together with newly constructed indicators of agro-ecological suitability in areas with low population density as...

We study the link between public enforcement of property rights, innovation investments, and economic growth in an endogenous growth framework with an expanding set of product varieties. We find that a government may assure positive equilibrium growth through public employment in the enforcement...

We propose a new criterion which reflects both the concern for welfare (utility) and the concern for rights in the evaluation of economic development paths. The concern for rights is captured by a pre-ordering over combinations of thresholds (floors or ceilings on various quantitative...

This paper shows that whether natural resources are good or bad for a country's development depends crucially on the interaction between institutional setting and the type of resources that the country possesses. Some natural resources are for economical and technical reasons more likely to...