Why Nations Fail? (Keynote Video Lecture)

First of all, it is a great pleasure to be here. Thank you forinviting me. Given that communicating from a far is not the easiestthing to do, what I have decided to do is to give a quick overview ofthe arguments that have emerged from the book that James and I wrote. Infact, this book is a synthesis of about 16 years of research that Jamesand I did. I think it is fair to say that a lot of economic developmentand economic growth is motivated by patterns that are reported in thebook. In particular, this is data from Angus Madison’s life’s work,which is not entirely uncontroversial, but the overall pattern here isfairly uncontroversial. The patterns that we observe have actually beenin the background of many attempts to understand long patterns ofeconomic development. I think they also point out that it is going to bevery difficult to understand why certain parts of the world that wereeither on par with, say, Asia, in particular the Indian Subcontinent andChina, have increased their income per capita and their prosperity somuch in 500 years leading to today, particularly from the period aroundearly 1800s to essentially to the end of the World War II, where thereis this big divergence taking place. The trends in economic developmentshow that United States of America, Canada, New Zealand and Australiahave pulled so much ahead of, say, Asia, where both India, the IndianSubcontinent in this case, and China more or less show the same picture,where there is not much growth going on until the end of the World WarII.