Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 553

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 30 of the 30 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

An African Success Story: Botswana

Open access
Acemoglu, Daron, Johnson, Simon H., Robinson, James A.·2001·SSRN Electronic Journal
DOI 10.2139/ssrn.290791
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

Botswana has had the highest rate of per-capita growth of any country in the world in the last 35 years. This occurred despite adverse initial conditions, including minimal investment during the colonial period and high inequality. Botswana achieved this rapid development by following orthodox economic policies. How Botswana sustained these policies is a puzzle because typically in Africa, "good economics" has proved not to be politically feasible. In this paper we suggest that good policies were chosen in Botswana because good institutions, which we refer to as institutions of private property, were in place. Why did institutions of private property arise in Botswana, but not other African nations? We conjecture that the following factors were important. First Botswana possessed relatively inclusive pre-colonial institutions, placing constraints on political elites. Second the effect of British colonialism on Botswana was minimal, and did not destroy these institutions. Third, following independence, maintaining and strengthening institutions of private property were in the economic interests of the elite. Fourth, Botswana is very rich in diamonds, which created enough rents that no groups wanted to challenge the status quo at the expenses of "rocking the boat." Finally we emphasize that this situation was reinforced by a number of critical decisions made by the post-independence leaders, particularly Presidents Khama, and Masire.

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.2139/ssrn.290791

Cites

30 of 30 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cites

Show all 30 references

Research works printed but not linked: 19

  1. J H Proctor, 1989, The House of Chiefs and the Political Development of Botswana, Journal of Modern African Studies, 6, 59, 10.1017/s0022278x00016670 · doi:10.1017/s0022278x00016670
  2. Jeffrey Ramsay, 1998, The Emergence of Political Parties in Botswana
  3. Terence Ranger, 1985, The Invention of Tribalism in Zimbabwe
  4. Ronald Robinson, 1977, Expansion and Reaction: Essays on European Expansion and Reactions in Asia and Africa
  5. Jay S Salkin, 1997, Aspects of the Botswana Economy: Selected Papers
  6. Isaac Schapera, 1952, The Ethnic Composition of Tswana Tribes
  7. Gloria M Somolakae, 1998, The Chieftancy System and Politics
  8. Roger Tangri, 1999, The Politics of Patronage in Africa
  9. Leonard Thompson, 1975, Survival in Two Worlds: Moshoeshoe of Lesotho 1786-1870, 10.1086/ahr/81.4.929-a · doi:10.1086/ahr/81.4.929-a
  10. Thomas Tlou, 1985, A History of Ngamiland 1750 to 1906: the formation of an African State
  11. Thomas Tlou, 1998, The Nature of Batswana States: Towards a Theory of Batswana traditional government -the Batawana case
  12. Walle Van Der, 1993, The Politics of Non-Reform in the Cameroon
  13. John Callaghy, Hemmed In: Responses to Africa's Economic Decline
  14. Leroy Ed Vail, 1991, The Creation of Tribalism in Southern Africa
  15. Richard Werbner, 1977, Small Man Politics and the Rule of Law: Center-Periphery Relations in East-Central Botswana, Journal of African Law, 21, 24, 10.1017/s0021855300008536 · doi:10.1017/s0021855300008536
  16. Jennifer A Widner, 1993, The Origins of Agricultural Policy in Ivory Coast, Journal of Development Studies, 29, 25, 10.1080/00220389308422294 · doi:10.1080/00220389308422294
  17. Jennifer A Widner, 1994, Single Party States and Agricultural Policies: The Cases of Ivory Coast and Kenya, Comparative Politics, 26, 127, 10.2307/422264 · doi:10.2307/422264
  18. Edwin N Wilmsen, 1989, Land Filled with Flies: A Political History of the Kalahari
  19. Diana Wylie, 1984, A Little God: The Twilight of Patriachy in a Southern African Chiefdom

Cited by

Metadata

Authors
Acemoglu, D., Johnson, S. H., & Robinson, J. A.
Venue
SSRN Electronic Journal
Publisher
Elsevier BV
Published
2001
ISSN
1556-5068 (ISSN-L)
DOI
10.2139/ssrn.290791
OpenAlex
W1493077203
Cited by
553
References
30
Type
posted content
Language
en
Open access
green

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.