Recent decades have seen almost unprecedented economic growth in
income per capita around the world. Yet this extraordinary overall
performance masks a wide variation in growth rates across different
countries, with persistent underdevelopment in some parts of the
world. This disparity constitutes "the development puzzle," and it
is exemplified by growth spurts in China and India that contrast
markedly with disturbingly low growth rates in sub-Saharan Africa.
In this volume, economists address issues of inequality and growth,
going beyond narrowly defined "economic" factors to consider the
effect on growth of the structure of governance, the quality of a
country's governing bodies, and the social norms that govern
collective decision-making. The contributors use both formal
modeling and empirical analyses to examine how the "soft factors"
of institutions and norms interact with growth performance, natural
resource endowments, and economic performance. They consider such
topics as the effects of decentralization in Africa, fiscal
discipline in Indian states, natural resource wealth as a cause of
corruption, social violence during the Indonesian financial crisis
of 1997 and 1998, and the effect of strong national identity on
redistributive politics. Some of their findings suggest that not
only do institutions and norms affect economic performance,
economic performance itself is a key factor in explaining such
governance failures as corruption and the frequency and intensity
of economic conflict. Mark Gradstein is Professor and Chair of the
Department of Economics at Ben Gurion University in Israel. Kai A.
Konrad is Professor of Economics at Free University of Berlin and
Director at the Social Science Research Center Berlin (WZB).
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