Hy Nations Fail

Why Nations Fail

NEW YORK TIMES AND WALL STREET JOURNAL BESTSELLER • From two winners of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, “who have demonstrated the importance of societal institutions for a country’s prosperity” “A wildly ambitious work that hopscotches through history and around the world to answer the very big question of why some countries get rich and others don’t.”—The New York Times FINALIST: Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post, Financial Times, The Economist, BusinessWeek, Bloomberg, The Christian Science Monitor, The Plain Dealer Why are some nations rich and others poor, divided by wealth and poverty, health and sickness, food and famine? Is it culture, the weather, or geography that determines prosperity or poverty? As Why Nations Fail shows, none of these factors is either definitive or destiny. Drawing on fifteen years of original research, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson conclusively show that it is our man-made political and economic institutions that underlie economic success (or the lack of it). Korea, to take just one example, is a remarkably homogenous nation, yet the people of North Korea are among the poorest on earth while their brothers and sisters in South Korea are among the richest. The differences between the Koreas is due to the politics that created those two different institutional trajectories. Acemoglu and Robinson marshal extraordinary historical evidence from the Roman Empire, the Mayan city-states, the Soviet Union, the United States, and Africa to build a new theory of political economy with great relevance for the big questions of today, among them: • Will China’s economy continue to grow at such a high speed and ultimately overwhelm the West? • Are America’s best days behind it? Are we creating a vicious cycle that enriches and empowers a small minority? “This book will change the way people think about the wealth and poverty of nations . . . as ambitious as Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel.”—BusinessWeek

Summary of Why Nations Fail

Why Nations Fail. Key Arguments and Empirical Support of the Theories

Essay from the year 2018 in the subject Politics - Topic: Globalization, Political Economics, University of Göttingen, language: English, abstract: “An estimated 766 million people, or 10.7 percent of the world’s population, lived in extreme poverty in 2013.” (World Bank 2017, p. 1) As if these numbers itself weren’t enough sign of the great inequality in incomes after centuries of prosperity, following the World Income Indicators, more than half of the people living under these circumstances originate from one region, Sub-Saharan-Africa. Maybe as long as growth has been observable, controversies about the causes and its inherent erratic distribution flourished. Over time, many hypotheses have been proposed, discussed and rejected. Two of the ones that managed to establish themselves are subject of this essay. More specifically, what their key arguments and empirical support are. One the one hand, the institutional theory of growth promoted most notably by Acemoglu and fellows (2012; 2005). On the other hand the geographic theory of growth, proposed by Sachs et al. (1998; 1999). Plan of the essay is as follows. Chapter II will describe the institutional theory of growth as described in Acemoglu and Robinson (2012). Chapter III assesses the key factors and their empirical support of the institutional and geographic growth hypotheses respectively. Followed by Chapter IV, which gives insight on surrounding literature. Chapter V discusses the main problems of each line of argument, concluding that the institutional model offers more consistency.