The DOI matches its Crossref record; 10 of the 10 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Political Losers as a Barrier to Economic Development
Abstract
Per-capita income in many sub-Saharan African countries, such as Chad and Niger, is less than 1/30th of that of the United States. Most economists and social scientists suspect that this is in part due to institutional failures that stop these societies from adopting the best technologies. A particularly interesting historical example comes from the di®usion of railways in the nineteenth century. While railways are regarded as a key technology driving the industrial revolution, there were large lags in its di®usion. For example, in 1850 the United States had 14,518km of track, Britain 9,797km and Germany 5,856km, in the Russian and Hapsburgh Empires there were just 501km and 1,357km, respectively (all data from Mitchell, 1993). Why do societies, as in this example, fail to adopt the best available technologies? One answer is that existing powerful `interest groups ' block the introduction of new technologies in order to protect their economic rents, and societies are able to make technological advances only if they can defeat such groups. Economic monopolies may be one example. A monopolist might wish to block the intro-
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Cites
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Monopoly Rights: A Barrier to Riches
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Self-citationEurope in the Russian Mirror: Four Lectures in Economic History
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Cited by
Persistence of power, Elites, and institutions
Acemoglu, D., & Robinson, J. A. (2008) · American Economic Review · doi:10.1257/aer.98.1.267 · Cited by 1,268
Self-citationDjankov, S., Glaeser, E., La Porta, R., Lopez-de-Silanes, F., & Shleifer, A. (2003) · Journal of Comparative Economics · doi:10.1016/j.jce.2003.08.005 · Cited by 1,204
Economic Backwardness in Political Perspective
ACEMOGLU, D., & ROBINSON, J. A. (2006) · American Political Science Review · doi:10.1017/s0003055406062046 · Cited by 709
Self-citationThe Digital Divide: The Role of Political Institutions in Technology Diffusion
Milner, H. V. (2006) · Comparative Political Studies · doi:10.1177/0010414005282983 · Cited by 433
Factor Endowments, Inequality, and Paths of Development among New World Economies
Engerman, S. L., & Sokoloff, K. L. (2002) · Economía · doi:10.1353/eco.2002.0013 · Cited by 420
Metadata
- Authors
- Acemoglu, D., & Robinson, J. A.
- Venue
- American Economic Review
- Publisher
- American Economic Association
- Published
- 2000-05-01
- Volume
- 90
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 126-130
- ISSN
- 0002-8282 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W1963974629
- Cited by
- 507
- References
- 10
- FWCI
- 42.03
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
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