This
course examines perhaps the most fundamental question in economics and
economic history: why are some places rich while others remain poor? It
is a big, complex and controversial question that escapes easy answers.
The aim of these lectures is not to push you to adopt any particular
view. Rather, I hope to walk you through the most influential theories
and to discuss some innovative empirical work that has tested and
quantified these models and hypothesis. In order to do this, I will draw
from narrative history, formal economic models and various strands of
empirical economics. I will also discuss some work that has applied the
lessons from history to contemporary contexts.
We
will start with a review of the stylized facts and a discussion about
growth in the pre-industrial era. The rest of the course is divided into
three interrelated parts. First, we will discuss the main candidates
for the fundamental causes of growth—luck, geography, culture and
institutions—and recent work that has evaluated their empirical
relevance. Second, we examine the interplay between these factors and
innovation (both technological and institutional). In this part, we will
also document how innovation invariably leads to creative destruction
and sometimes to plain crises. We end by discussing how increased
migration, social mobility and participation of women in the formal
labor market reduced the waste of talent and thus gave rise to a more
efficient allocation of labor.
See the full syllabus in the Materials section.