Cross-country evidence shows that a subset of developing countries is growing very rapidly, taking advantage of opportunities to "catch-up" at the same time that other developing countries are growing slowly. We argue that this is due to differences in the quality of governance. In particular we...

Trade and export, it is argued, spur economic growth. This paper studies the microeconomics of exporting. We build a heuristic model of transactions between exporters and producers and relate it to East India Company (EIC) operations in colonial Bengal. Our model and the historical record stress...