The growth surge produced by East Asian newly industrialised nations since 1970s has been a central theme of research and debate amongst many social scientists and policy makers. From an “institutionalist” perspective, the idea of “development state” was theorised to explain this “East...

The mixed growth performance of emerging market economies has revived angst about a "middle-income trap". However, a forensic review of statistical evidence shows that middle-income countries “escape” to higher income levels more often than both poorer and richer countries. At the same time,...

By analysing the economic policies and the politico-institutional structures of the high-performing Asian economies, this article seeks to identify the fundamental determinants underlying the East Asian miracle and to elaborate implications for other developing and transitional countries. While...

We discuss the effect of formal political institutions (electoral systems, fiscal decentralization, presidential and parliamentary regimes) on the extent and direction of income (re-)distribution. Empirical evidence is presented for a large sample of 70 economies and a panel of 13 OECD countries...

In this thesis, we will explore what led to the economic development and growth or lack of, in four African Countries with an imperial history. The countries chosen, have two different modern trajectories, the first of the countries; The Democratic Republic of Congo and Kenya have a history of...

The idea that all types of economic freedom - including limited government - promote prosperity is challenged by the fact that some countries successfully combine a large public sector with high taxes and otherwise high levels of economic freedom. To explain the co-existence of economic freedom...

We present a simple model that illustrates how democracy may improve the quality of economic institutions. The model further suggests that institutional quality varies more across autocracies than across democracy and that the positive effect of democracy on institutional quality is increasing...

We analyze the relationship between pre-colonial warfare and long-run development patterns in India. We construct a new geocoded database of historical interstate conflicts on the Indian subcontinent, from which we compute measures of local exposure to pre-colonial warfare. We document a...

Sovereign nations grow faster than non-sovereign ones. When Pakistan ceded economic management to the IMF in the late 1980s, the turn to neo-liberalism led to 14 years of decline in long-run rate of investment and growth from which it hasn't recovered. This cost the economy an estimated $75.6...

We test the reproducibility and replicability of Dincecco et al. (2022), which reports a positive relationship between pre-colonial interstate warfare and long-run development patterns across India. Overall, we confirm that all of the study's estimates are computationally reproducible by using...