In Search of Prosperity: Analytic Narratives on Economic Growth

Abstract

An enormous amount of cross‐country econometric studies have tried to isolate the determinants of economic growth. Although the cross‐country regression approach has been very useful in highlighting correlates, it leaves some of the most interesting and important questions concerning growth unanswered. For example, as the editor of this volume, Dani Rodrik, asks; ‘How has China managed to grow so rapidly despite the absence of full‐fledged property rights? What happened in India after the early 1980s to lift its growth rate by approximately three percentage points? Why do the Philippines and Bolivia continue to stagnate despite a sharp improvement in their ‘fundamentals’ since the 1980s?’ To address these types of questions this volume takes a novel approach by asking leading growth economists to write analytical case studies of individual countries, utilising their knowledge of modern growth theory and recent empirical work. The introduction by Rodrik contains a useful framework for thinking about income differences and the subsequent chapters. The distinction is made between proximate sources of income differences like physical capital, human capital, and productivity and deeper causes such as geography, integration, and institutions.

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