Geography, biogeography and the international distribution of prosperity

The Neolithic transition from hunting and gathering to sedentary agriculture, which made possible the rapid technological progress that ultimately led to the Industrial Revolution, is one of the most important events in thousands of years of humankind’s economic development. In this paper we present theory and evidence showing that geography and biogeography exerted decisive influence on the location and timing of transitions to agriculture, to complex social organization and, eventually, to modern industrial production. Evidence from a large cross-section of countries indicates that the effects of geographic and initial biogeographic conditions on present-day levels of economic development are remarkably strong, even when conditioned on institutional arrangements that exert powerful proximate influence on the productivity of nations.