— A country’s mix of products predicts its subsequent pattern of diversification and economic growth. But does this product mix also predict income inequality? Here we combine methods from econometrics, network science, and economic complexity to show that countries exporting complex products—as measured by the Economic Complexity Index—have lower levels of income inequality than countries expo...

This paper investigates the institutional reason underlying the change in the trajectory of economic growth in post-reform China, and argues that the trajectory of growth was much more normal during the period of 1978-89 than in the post-1989 era. In the former period, growth was largely induced by equality-generating institutional change in agriculture and the emergence of non-state industrial...

High quality institutions, such as rule of law, bureaucratic quality, freedom from government expropriation, and freedom from government repudiation of contracts, mitigate the adverse economic consequences of ethnic fractionalization identified by Easterly and Levine 1997 and others. In countries with sufficiently good institutions, ethnic diversity does not lower growth or worsen economic poli...

Levels of economic development vary widely within countries in the Americas. We argue that this variation can be explained by di erences in institutions which in turn have their roots in the colonial era. Colonizers engaged in di erent economic activities in di erent regions of a country, depending on the local conditions and the supply of native labor. Some activities, such as mining and sugar...

The new comparative economics focuses on individual institutions rather than considering the economic system as an entity. In this essay we argue that economic systems should be defined in terms of clusters of complementary or covarying institutions. A cluster analysis of OECD countries, using data on forty different economic institutions, shows that four economic systems can be used to charact...

In 1994 the World Bank and the IMF marked the fiftieth anniversary of their founding meeting at Bretton Woods. The occasion was hardly one of celebration for the two Washington institutions with which official post-war international financial arrangements are most closely identified. For, paradoxically, in the lengthy wake of the Uruguay Round of the GATT, the World Trade Organisation was loomi...

Many economists and social scientists have recently emphasized the importance of government policies, economic, political and legal institutions, and more broadly, the organization of society.1 There is also mounting evidence that various institutional features are indeed important for economic growth.2 Nevertheless, despite important theoretical advances, we still lack an organizational framew...

Until the twentieth century, economics and politics were studied together under the heading of political economy. Two major nineteenth-century treatises on the subject, by David Ricardo (1817) and John Stuart Mill (1848), had the title Principles of Political Economy. Toward the end of that century, the subdisciplines separated; the turning point might be marked by the publication of Alfred Mar...

Economists have a long argue that institutions and implementation of good governance are important for economic growth. The main objective of this research is to demonstrate that one of positive institutions effects is its ability to mitigate the negative effect of economic vulnerability linked to terms of trade fluctuations on economic growth. The impact of the economic vulnerability and imple...

This book, "The Mystery of Economic Growth," which was recently published in Hebrew, provides an excellent non-technical description of the developments of growth economics over the last half century. The story of the ideas and research of the theory and empirics of economic growth is organized around four themes. First, the importance of the accumulation of physical and human capital for the e...