Review of Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty by Daron Acemoglu & James Robinson
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.62374/e95zft55Keywords:
colonization, institutions, development economics, failure of nations, cultural normsAbstract
Why is Mexico poorer than the United States? For Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, the answer is straightforward: institutions, or – more specifically – the institutional heritage of the past. To make this concrete, in Why Nations Fail (WNF) they blame the encomienda – a rather brutal form of serfdom used by the Spanish in the process of colonization. After the defeat of the Aztec empire in 1521, the Spanish imposed the system as a means of extracting tribute from the local population. Each encomendero would be allocated a number of Native Americans, who would then be used essentially as slave labor.
References
Acemoglu, D., Johnson, S., & Robinson, J. A. (2001). The colonial origins of comparative development: An empirical investigation. American Economic Review, 91(5), 1369-1401. https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.91.5.1369
Acemoglu, D., & Robinson, J. A. (2012). Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty. New York: Crown Publishers. https://doi.org/10.1355/ae29-2j
Besley, T., & Persson, T. (2011). Pillars of Prosperity: The Political Economics of Development Clusters. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. https://doi.org/10.23943/princeton/9780691152684.001.0001
Denzau, A. T., & North, D. C. (1994). Shared mental models: Ideologies and institutions. Kyklos, 47(1), 3-31. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6435.1994.tb02246.x
North, D. C., Wallis, J. J., & Weingast, B. R. (2009). Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511575839
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