This paper studies how comparative advantage and the political elites' endowments shape long-run performance in an economy with imperfect political institutions. In a capital-scarce economy, an autocrat catering to the needs of landowners favours openness to trade at an early stage of...

The objective of this paper is to study the effect of institutional factors on economic growth of a set of 37 developed and developing countries for six successive periods of five years, from 1975 until 2000, using a static panel data model. The key findings generated by this empirical test...

Using a panel of up to 116 countries from 1970 to 2010 we estimate the effects of foreign aid flows on a variety of measures of institutional quality. We find that aid flows are associated with the deterioration of both political and economic institutions. Regarding the latter, aid flows are...

Recent empirical studies confirm a positive relationship between trade liberalization or trade openness and the quality of domestic economic institutions. An isolated analysis of trade openness per se, however, may grossly simplify the mechanisms at work, as the linkage between open trade and...

This paper surveys the growing empirical neo-institutional literature dealing with economic development and shows that it has essentially developed a one-dimensional perspective on institutions and their effect on economic development that has overlooked the fact that economic effects of...