Abstract
Can an Evolutionary Approach to Development Predict Post-War Economic Growth?
Louis Putterman
1999
Recent literature on economic development has begun to explore
the idea that there are important social or institutional
preconditions to modern growth. This paper explains why
readiness for growth in the post-War era may be to an important
degree a function of the type of pre-modern economy that
characterized a present-day country. Pre-modern development,
proxied by production system intensity measures in the spirit of
Boserup, is shown to explain a substantial fraction of the
variation in post-War growth experience across countries and
across regions of one country that is left unexplained by
conventional measures.
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This page last updated on: March 18, 1999