Growth, geography, colonial legacies, trade, redistribution, regimes, globalization, power, and who gains from institutional change.
Why Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson argue that politics beats geography in the long run—and where the 'inclusive vs. extractive' framework helps, and where it oversimplifies.
How a German American economist re-framed 'protection' as nation-building: productivity, industry, and the long arc from catching up to competing on world markets.
A plain-language guide to the famous terms-of-trade thesis: why its logic captured the Global South, how econometrics responded, and what still divides development economists.
How the transformation of agriculture during industrialization shaped political orders — from Kautsky and Lenin to postwar land reforms in East Asia and the Green Revolution's uneven legacy.
Countries rich in oil, minerals, and gas often grow slower and govern worse than resource-poor neighbors — but the explanation lies in institutions, not geology, and the story is more complicated than the textbook version.
Alexander Gerschenkron argued that latecomers to industrialization can leapfrog by borrowing technology and substituting institutions — a thesis that shaped how we think about catch-up growth from Germany to China.
In July 1944, delegates from 44 nations gathered at a New Hampshire resort to design a new international monetary system. The institutions they created — the IMF and World Bank — still shape global finance today.
When inflation and unemployment rose simultaneously in the 1970s, it shattered the postwar economic orthodoxy and opened the door to monetarism, supply-side economics, and the neoliberal revolution.
John Williamson's 1989 list of ten policy reforms was more modest than its critics claim and more flawed than its defenders admit — a history of the most misunderstood label in development economics.
Development requires states that can actually do things — but defining and measuring that ability turns out to be one of the hardest problems in political economy.
The 'China shock' research showed that trade's losers were real, concentrated, and lasting — and it changed how economists think about globalization.
From Rosenstein-Rodan's coordinated industrialization to Hirschman's productive imbalance, the great postwar debate about how poor countries escape poverty traps — and why it still echoes today.
The thirty glorious years of Western postwar prosperity were historically exceptional — and understanding why they ended is essential for anyone who invokes them as a model.