Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty

By Daron Acemoglu, James A. Robinson. 2012

625 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In the West are the 'haves', while much of the rest of the world are the 'have-nots'. The extent of inequality today is unprecedented. Drawing on an extraordinary range of contemporary and historical examples, Why Nations Fail looks at the root of the problems facing some nations. Economists and scientists have offered useful insights into the reasons for certain aspects of poverty, such as Jeffrey Sachs (it's geography and the weather), and Jared Diamond (it's technology and species). But most theories ignore the incentives and institutions that populations need to invest and prosper: they need to know that if they work hard, they can make money and actually keep it - and the key to ensuring these incentives is sound institutions. Incentives and institutions are what separate the have and have-nots. Based on fifteen years of research, and stepping boldly into the territory of Ian Morris's Why the West Rules - For Now, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson blend economics, politics, history and current affairs to provide a new, persuasive way of understanding wealth and poverty. And, perhaps most importantly, they provide a pragmatic basis for the hope that those mired in poverty can be placed on the path to prosperity.

Subfields: Political Science and International Relations

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/902680c2c10b052dd5afb3b11b8678884f0a291f

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In Political Science and International Relations

Citations in the corpus

The European origins of economic development (2014, background): “Thus, creating a small European settlement in a region with no Europeans could actually curtail economic development by encouraging the establishment of extractive institutions (Acemoglu and Robinson 2012).”
The Effect of the Tsetse Fly on African Development (2015, background): “First, slave systems tended to be technologically backwardsthis is because the producers (the slaves) had no incentive to innovate as all rewards would be expropriated by their masters (Acemoglu and Robinson, 2012, p. 172). Second, slavery hindered human capital formation. Borjas (1992) has modeled”
The Power of the Street: Evidence from Egypt's Arab Spring (2017, background): “…in order to deal with popular pressures or even institutional constraints on their power, thus recreating some of the initial advantages and privileges they had via different channels (this also builds on Michael’s’s Iron Law of Oligarchy, 1966, as discussed in Acemoglu and Robinson (2012)).”
International Trade and Institutional Change: Medieval Venice’s Response to Globalization (2014, background): “In short, long-distance trade first encouraged and then discouraged institutional dynamism and these changes operated via the impacts of trade on the distribution of wealth and power.”
The Value of Connections in Turbulent Times: Evidence from the United States (2016, background): “administration by Suskind (2011) and Scheiber (2011) and rst-hand accounts by Bair (2012) and Barofsky (2012) (none of which are particularly sympathetic to Geithner) contain no suggestion of corruption.”
The Facts of Economic Growth (2015, background): “Figure 33 shows the growth rate of real GDP per person in the United States since 35For example, see also Hall and Jones (1999), Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson (2001), and Acemoglu and Robinson (2012).”
Political machinery: did robots swing the 2016 US presidential election? (2018, methodology): “Prior to the ‘great escape’ brought by the Industrial Revolution, political leaders frequently banned any labour-saving technology for fear of social unrest, providing one explanation for why economic growth was stagnant for most of human history (Acemoglu and Robinson, 2013; Mokyr, 1990).”