State history and economic development: evidence from six millennia
By O. Borcan, Ola Olsson, Louis Putterman. Journal of economic growth (Boston), 2017
156 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The presence of a state is one of the most reliable historical predictors of social and economic development. In this article, we complete the coding of an extant indicator of state presence from 3500 BCE forward for almost all but the smallest countries of the world today. We outline a theoretical framework where accumulated state experience increases aggregate productivity in individual countries but where newer or relatively inexperienced states can reach a higher productivity maximum by learning from the experience of older states. The predicted pattern of comparative development is tested in an empirical analysis where we introduce our extended state history variable. Our key finding is that the current level of economic development across countries has a hump-shaped relationship with accumulated state history.
Subfields: Demography, Economics and Econometrics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8d7f859f0e7c581e5231f020b4f1f5a63eb46c9a
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In Demography
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Citations in the corpus
- States and economic growth: Capacity and constraints☆ (2017, background): “In Borcan et al. (2014) they weigh all periods equally. independence in the middle ages have higher levels of civic capital today as measured by the number of non-profit organizations per capita and levels of organ donation.”