Why some countries are rich and most are not.
11 topics · 11 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Social experiments to fight poverty
Esther Duflo (TED) · 2010
Argues that development questions like whether bed nets should be free are empirical rather than ideological, and that randomised trials settle them…
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Nobel Lecture: The Economics of Being Poor
Theodore W. Schultz · 1979
Argues that farmers in poor countries are efficient allocators of the resources available to them, so the binding constraint on agricultural…
+1 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Economic Development with Unlimited Supplies of Labour
W. Arthur Lewis · 1954
Models development as the transfer of workers from a low-productivity subsistence sector to a growing capitalist sector, where wages stay near…
+7 more at this level
11 works
Esther Duflo (TED)
Argues that development questions like whether bed nets should be free are empirical rather than ideological, and that randomised trials settle them where decades of argument did not.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Theodore W. Schultz
Argues that farmers in poor countries are efficient allocators of the resources available to them, so the binding constraint on agricultural development is access to better technology and human capital, not irrationality.
link checked 17 Sept 2026George Psacharopoulos & Harry Anthony Patrinos
Synthesises decades of country-level estimates to show schooling still pays a high private return in developing countries, with the largest gains at the primary level.
link checked 17 Sept 2026W. Arthur Lewis
Models development as the transfer of workers from a low-productivity subsistence sector to a growing capitalist sector, where wages stay near subsistence until the surplus labour is absorbed.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Jeffrey Sachs & Andrew Warner
Finds that resource-rich developing countries grew more slowly than resource-poor ones between 1970 and 1990, and traces the gap to the way resource wealth crowds out other export sectors.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Craig Burnside & David Dollar
Finds that foreign aid raises growth only in countries with already-sound fiscal, monetary and trade policy, and has little effect where policy is poor, making the case for allocating aid conditional on policy quality.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James A. Robinson
Uses settler mortality as an instrument to argue that where Europeans could not safely settle they built extractive institutions, and that those institutions rather than geography explain today's income differences.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Edward Miguel & Michael Kremer
A randomised deworming trial that measured effects on untreated neighbouring schools too, finding the programme's real value was concentrated in the externality standard trials miss.
59 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026Ricardo Hausmann, Dani Rodrik & Andrés Velasco
Proposes a decision-tree method for finding the single binding constraint on a country's growth, arguing against generic reform checklists because the same policy can be irrelevant in one country and decisive in another.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Angus Deaton
Argues that household survey data on consumption, not GDP, is what should anchor poverty measurement, and that the choices built into international poverty lines quietly determine who counts as poor.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, Rachel Glennerster & Cynthia Kinnan
Randomises access to microcredit across Hyderabad slums and finds it expanded small business investment but produced no detectable gains in average household income, consumption or measures of well-being.
link checked 17 Sept 2026