The Glacial Speed of Institutional Change

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I just finished reading “The Long Process of Development” by Jerry Hough and Robin Grier. The quick response is that you should read this book. If that’s enough, then go get it. All the rest of this post is just some of my reactions to the book.

The basic idea of HG is to trace out how long it took England and Spain (and by extension, their colonies Mexico and the U.S.) to evolve the elements of “good institutions” that we think promote economic growth. Clearly the process went faster in some of these places than others, but the point is that it took centuries regardless of who we are talking about.

HG look at the development of an effective state in England through history. For them, England gets a minimally effective state with Henry VII in 1485. His victory in the War of the Roses (and in particular his ruthless elimination of others with claims to the throne) gave him a government that had at least some control over the entire area of England and Wales. So is that when England has good institutions? No, not really. From that point, it is another two hundred and four years until the Glorious Revolution and what we might call the beginnings of constitutional monarchy. All good? Not quite. It is another one hundred and forty three years before the Reform Act of 1832 generates the barest seeds of what might be called inclusive institutions. Even if you think that England in 1832 had “good institutions” for economic development, that was three hundred and forty-seven years after England got a functioning central government. If we lower our sights and say that the Glorious Revolution had given England the “good institutions” necessary for economic development, then that was still two hundred years after England got a functioning central government.

The second major example used by HG is Spain. By 1504, Isabella had acquired a kingdom that essentially looks like modern Spain in geographic reach. She was the monarch of Castile, the Moors had been forced out of Granada, and she had brought Aragon into the kingdom by marrying Ferdinand. HG then document that despite this geographic reach, the government of Spain was not an effective central government in the way that Henry VII or VIII had over England. Even Philip II’s reign in the late 1500’s did not consolidate government in a way that seems consistent with his numerous foreign military activities. HG argue that Spain was about 200 years behind England, and only reached an effective central government around 1700. It would be arguably another 280 years after that before Spain got what we would call “good institutions”.

Regardless of the exact historical case study, HG’s point is that developing modern institutions the support sustained economic growth takes centuries, even in one case – England – where all the breaks kept going their way.

What is the point of this regarding development and growth? HG suggest that a large number of developing countries have a central government with the capabilities roughly equal to those of Henry VII. Many of them began as separately defined states only in the 1960’s, and in the subsequent fifty years have perhaps gained the ability to extend their powers of taxation and coercion to all corners of their geographic area. In places like Afghanistan, they cannot even do that.

Asking, expecting, or advising these countries to adopt “good institutions” is to ask them to skip between two and five centuries of institutional evolution in one leap. Developing countries evolving their own stable institutional structures that support economic growth is going to be long, ugly, and likely violent – just like it was in every single currently rich country. HG’s work says that institutions are not just another technology. While you can play catch-up relatively easily with technology (e.g. adopting mobile phones without landline networks), you cannot do the same with institutions.

Further, institutional development is always going to involve some coercion. Some group is going to have to be dragged kicking and screaming into the new institutional arrangement. HG clearly reject the idea that new social contracts will spontaneously get re-negotiated as circumstances change, as in the old North and Weingast interpretation of the Glorious Revolution in England. In contrast they accept the more Mancur Olson-ian view, that social contracts are whatever the dude with the gun says they are. The only way to accelerate the development process is to accelerate the concentration of coercive power with one group/party/coalition. From that perspective, the problem with the U.S. attempts at state building in Afghanistan and Iraq was not that they intervened, but that this intervention was half-assed and ended before the job was done. If you are going to intervene, pick a winner and then make sure they win. Trying to equalize power across different factions is precisely the wrong thing you should do to encourage institutional development. That is me spinning the argument out to a logical extreme, but it makes the point.

A last mild critique of HG is that it has a fault similar to most other work on institutions. It does not define what a “good institutions” are. We know that England and the U.S. have them now, and that Spain seems to have them at least since after Franco. We know that England had “good” institutions in or around the 1800’s, and Spain apparently didn’t. And we know that England and Spain had “bad” institutions before the 1500’s. So it must be that institutional evolution takes somewhere between three and five centuries? But what precisely is it that England and Spain have today that they didn’t in 1500? What is a good institution?

HG are more clear than many on this point. They consciously limit themselves to examining whether a central government has effective control of taxation and violence within its borders. But of course, what does effective control mean? What does taxation mean – what’s the difference between a tribute, a donation, expropriation, and a tax? Does control of violence simply mean that all the people coercing others wear the same uniform?

This critique doesn’t eliminate the value of reading the book. The general point about the long time lags in the evolution of institutions (good or bad) is excellent. It is hard to fight time compression when reading history, and HG make clear that the institutions literature needs to get far more serious about that fight.

All Institutions, All the Time?

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Wolfgang Keller and Carol Shiue just released a working paper on “Market Integration as a Mechanism for Growth“. They are looking at growth in Germany during the 19th century, and proxy for growth by using city population growth, on the presumption that people only flood into cities that are booming economically. They examine the explanatory power of both market integration and institutions for city population growth, and hence for economic growth.

To measure market integration KS use the spread in wheat prices between pairs of cities. The smaller the spread, the more integrated the cities are. Larger price spreads indicate either high transportation costs and/or some kind of other barrier to transactions that keeps trade from reducing this spread. Why wheat? Because it is widely traded, homogenous, and they have good data on it.

For institutions, KS use three different measures, all binary indicators: abolition of guilds, equality before the law, and the ability to redeem feudal lands. The very good part about their measures are that they are binary, and this conforms to the historical situation. As Napoleon conquered German territories, he imposed some very specific institutional change in these places. So one can reasonably code a 0/1 variable for whether a specific city had abolished guilds, or had imposed equality before the law (that is, adopted the Napoleonic code), or allowed redemption of feudal lands. There is natural variation across German cities in when (or if) these institutional changes took place, based on Napoleon’s activity. (This empirical set-up is drawn from Acemoglu, Cantoni, and Robinson).

The binary indicators are fine as they are. But KS then do a bad thing, and average these measures. Regular readers of this blog know how I feel about arbitrary indexes of institutions, and averaging creates an arbitrary index. Their main specification averages the first two (guilds and legal equality). This effectively presumes that abolishing guilds and legal equality have precisely the same effect. A city that abolished guilds but did not adopt legal equality has an institutional level exactly equal to one that did not abolish guilds but did adopt legal equality. Why should this be identical in effect? These are clearly not institutional substitutes. They potentially have wildly different effects on economic activity. If you want to use different measures of institutions in this kind of study, then you should incorporate these measures separately in your regressions.

That gripe aside, what do KS do? First, they realize that if they just regress city population growth on their institutional measure and their measure of price gaps, then this is subject to all sorts of objections regarding endogeneity and omitted variables. So KS come up with instruments. They use a dummy for French rule to instrument for institutions, as only those places conquered by Napoleon necessarily adopted the institutional reforms (this is also the Acemoglu et al strategy). They then use a geographic measure of the slope of terrain surrounding a city as an instrument for market integration. This is because the cost of shipping by rail increases with the slope of the terrain (gravity is a bitch). They make an argument that both French rule and the slope characteristics are exogenous to city population growth, and serve as valid instruments.

They’re using IV, so you could also chuck rocks at the instruments and claim they don’t work. If you’re going to do that, you need to have some plausible story for why the IV’s aren’t exogenous. I don’t have a good story like that, so I’m going to take their IV strategy as solid.

What do they find? They find that city population is significantly and negatively related to market integration (price gaps) and insignificantly (but positively) related to institutions. Cities that had smaller price gaps with other cities, and so were more integrated into the wider economy, experienced more rapid city population growth over the 19th century. Cities with better institutions may have had higher city population growth, but the evidence is too noisy to know for sure. For future reference, their 2nd-stage regression has an R-squared of 68%, which includes the impact of city and year fixed effects. The regression also predicts 73% of the actual city growth in the mean city. So they have what I would consider a lot of explanatory power (although a bunch could just be due to fixed effects).

Here is where I start to get confused by the paper. I look at this and think, “Looks like institutions – at least the abolition of guilds and the Napoleonic code – didn’t have a big impact on city growth. Holding those institutions constant, more integrated cities grew faster.” But KS seem determined to find an interpretation of these results that preserves the primacy of institutions as an explanation for growth. They take this result and say it does not tell us about the relative importance of institutions, meaning those two or three very specific institutions of guild abolition, legal equality, and feudal redemption.

They argue that what you should really be doing is not looking at the lack of significance on institutions in this regression, but do some different counter-factuals. So they do two different regressions. They regress city population growth on market integration only, with market integration instrumented by only the geography instruments. This is their “mechanisms” model, and it is intended to capture just the pure effect of market integration. That specification yields an R-squared of 49%, and predicts 44% of actual city growth in the mean city. Again, these numbers include any influence of the city and time fixed effects, so this isn’t all due to market integration.

They then do the mirror image of this. They regress city population growth on institutions, instrumented with only the French rule instrument. This is their “institutions” model, and is intended to capture the pure effect of institutions. That gives them an R-squared of 15%, and predicts 13% of actual city growth in the mean city. Again, these numbers reflect the explanatory power of institutions and the city and time fixed effects.

Unsurprisingly, both of these separate regressions have less explanatory power than the combined specification. But it sure seems as if market integration is far more important that institutions, doesn’t it? The R-squared is 49% versus 15%, and remember that those both include the explanatory power of the city and time fixed effects. So it could well be that the explanatory power of institutions was zero, and the explanatory power of market integration is like 34%. (This is knowable, by the way, and I’d suggest they report the partial R-squared’s in the paper.)

KS press on, though, to keep institutions a central part of the story. They argue that we should view institutions as fundamental, and that institutions led to market integration, which led to further growth. In support of this, they use their first-stage results from the main specification. This shows that market integration is significantly related to both the French rule dummy and the geographic variables affecting rail costs. On the other hand, the institutions measure is only significantly related to the French rule dummy. From this, they conclude that “Institutional change led to gains in the integration of markets, but market integration did not, at least in the short run, affect institutions.” Institutions are more fundamental, so to speak.

I don’t think this follows from those first stages. Market integration is related to the French rule dummy, which is not a measure of institutions. It is a measure of whether the French ever ruled that particular city. It captures everything about French rule, not just those three particular institutional reforms. It captures, in part, whether Napoleon thought the city was worth taking over, and I would venture to guess this depended a lot on whether the city was well-connected with the rest of Germany. He needed to move troops around, so cities that were already well-integrated to other areas via roads would be particularly attractive. The French rule dummy does not tell me that institutions matter for market integration. They tell me that places conquered by Napoleon were better connected to other cities.

I’m not sure why it is so crucial to establish that these particular institutions in this time frame were important for growth. KS have a really cool paper here, with an impressive collection of data, an interesting time period to analyze, and a lot of results that stand up by themselves as interesting facts. Why shove it through the pin-hole of institutions?

I think KS could have easily written this paper as evidence that market integration matters more than the three institutions they study. And that would be okay. It doesn’t mean INSTITUTIONS don’t matter for growth, it means that guild abolition, legal equality, and feudal redemption were not important for growth. That leaves approximately an infinity of other institutions that could be important for growth. Given the ambiguous definition of institution, market integration is an institution itself, even if it depends on (gasp!) geography. Eliminating some institutions as relevant would be helpful at this stage, as the literature has to this point (miraculously?) found that every single institutional structure studied really matters for growth. Have we reached the point where publication requires finding each and every single institution relevant for growth?

Trust and the Benefit of the Doubt

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This is going to go off the rails quickly, so hang on. First, read this classic Douglas Adams story, and pay attention to what you think this tells you about English culture:

This actually did happen to a real person, and the real person was me. I had gone to catch a train. This was April 1976, in Cambridge, U.K. I was a bit early for the train. I’d gotten the time of the train wrong. I went to get myself a newspaper to do the crossword, and a cup of coffee and a packet of cookies. I went and sat at a table.

I want you to picture the scene. It’s very important that you get this very clear in your mind. Here’s the table, newspaper, cup of coffee, packet of cookies. There’s a guy sitting opposite me, perfectly ordinary-looking guy wearing a business suit, carrying a briefcase. It didn’t look like he was going to do anything weird. What he did was this: he suddenly leaned across, picked up the packet of cookies, tore it open, took one out, and ate it.

Now this, I have to say, is the sort of thing the British are very bad at dealing with. There’s nothing in our background, upbringing, or education that teaches you how to deal with someone who in broad daylight has just stolen your cookies.

You know what would happen if this had been South Central Los Angeles. There would have very quickly been gunfire, helicopters coming in, CNN, you know. . . But in the end, I did what any red-blooded Englishman would do: I ignored it. And I stared at the newspaper, took a sip of coffee, tried to do a clue in the newspaper, couldn’t do anything, and thought, what am I going to do?

In the end I thought, Nothing for it, I’ll just have to go for it, and I tried very hard not to notice the fact that the packet was already mysteriously opened. I took out a cookie for myself. I thought, That settled him. But it hadn’t because a moment or two later he did it again. He took another cookie. Having not mentioned it the first time, it was somehow even harder to raise the subject the second time around. “Excuse me, I couldn’t help but notice . . .” I mean, it doesn’t really work.

We went through the whole packet like this. When I say the whole packet, I mean there were only about eight cookies, but it felt like a lifetime. He took one, I took one, he took one, I took one. Finally, when we got to the end, he stood up and walked away. Well, we exchanged meaningful looks, then he walked away, and I breathed a sigh of relief and sat back.

A moment or two later the train was coming in, so I tossed back the rest of my coffee, stood up, picked up the newspaper, and underneath the newspaper were my cookies.

The thing I like particularly about this story is the sensation that somewhere in England there has been wandering around for the last quarter-century a perfectly ordinary guy who’s had the same exact story, only he doesn’t have the punch line.

You’re welcome for funny story and lack of math. Now, is there something to make out of this story regarding cultural explanations for economic growth? (If you answered no, let me remind you that this is the internet, so yes, of course every anecdote has deep meaning.)

Think about Adams and the other man bumbling around England on a day to day basis, taking advantage of a culture in which trust is high. They make anonymous transaction after anonymous transaction with strangers every day: buying the cookies, buying the newspaper, getting a train ticket, etc.. They never really question that the other party will come through with the cookies, the newspaper, or the train ride. It saves them all the time and effort of either providing these things themselves, or of spending their time and effort enforcing their implicit contracts (perhaps through physical coercion). Trust also implies that property rights will be respected. People will not arbitrarily steal my things, and I will not arbitrarily steal theirs. So I am willing to undertake transactions, because I know I can retain the profits/goods/utility from that transaction.

But in the story, *both* Adams and the stranger think the other has deviated from that norm. He stole the cookies!

And what do they do about it? Nothing! Nothing happens. This violation of the culture of trust does not cause Adams or the other man to play “deviate” and assault the other, or demand the cookies, or even so much as mention it. So this got me to think about what exactly is the important element of the norm of trust.

Perhaps it is really just the benefit of the doubt. Adams says nothing because he trusts that the other man wouldn’t deliberately violate the norm. As it turns out, this is correct; the man did not. So does trust mean that even if there is a deviation from the norm, you act as if there was not? You allow for the possibility or likelihood that it was accidental. This allows you to avoid confrontation, cost, and a breakdown of trust. Does trust matter because it makes you wait a minute, a day, or whatever before acting to punish someone who deviates? And in so doing ensures that you only punish those who actually deviate? Which means you can expect the same consideration, and so are willing to undertake transactions, because you know you won’t be falsely accused if you are acting in good faith? Let’s call this “Type II trust” in that you want to avoid falsely rejecting the null of cooperation by the other person. I think Adams and the other man display Type II trust: they is incredibly unwilling to reject the null. So unwilling that one of them even walks away having literally been cheated out of his cookies (and Adams walks away with a great story).

This is differentiated from “Type I trust”, where you want to avoid falsely accepting the null of cooperation when in fact you are being cheated. Type I trust is pretty naive: assume that everyone will cooperate with you, and occasionally you’ll be wrong. Type I trust would be like the other man pushing the box of cookies over to Adams and offering him one explicitly, perhaps on the assumption that Adams would return the favor. But that is clearly not what Adams is describing.

Perhaps the cultural advantage of the Western economies in economic transactions is that they have a particularly large amount of Type II trust, but not necessarily more Type I trust. That is, Western economies are just as suspicious of new transactions with strangers, and usually need some third-party reference to undertake them in the first place. However, once convinced to transact with a stranger, they have a higher tolerance for apparent deviation, willing to wait it out to see if in fact they were cheated. More transactions take place successfully, and more people are able to acquire trustworthy reputations, because there is no rush to judgement. More trustworthy reputations means more transactions, and so forth.

Yes, I know that’s a lot to suck out of a Douglas Adams anecdote. And I’m certain that somewhere, someone has written something about these varying shades of trust before. So feel free to school me up in the comments.

Great Britain and Laissez Not-so-Faire Economics

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I recently finished State, Economy, and the Great Divergence by Peer Vries. It’s a comparison of the activities of the state in Great Britain and China in the period running up to and including the Industrial Revolution, roughly 1650-1850.

Vries critiques the standard view on the role of the state and the divergence between these two places, encapsulating that view in the following:

In the Smithian interpretation of British economic history, that fits in quite neatly with the Whig interpretation of Britains overall history, the primacy of Britain and its industrialization are by and large regarded as the culmination of a long process in which Britains economy increasingly became characterized by free and fair competition and in which government increasingly tended to behave according to Smithian logics.
….
For those who endorse them, the predicament of imperial China, that it did not industrialize, has always been quite easy to explain. They only need to refer to the fact that China was characterized by some kind of oriental despotism. This notion has a long pedigree whose beginnings can be traced back at least to Marco Polo.

The alternative that Vries proposes is that China is far more “Smithian” than Great Britain in this period, in the sense that it operated a very hands-off government that mainly served to provide some subsistence insurance to its population, while Great Britain had a relatively large, intrusive, and active government managing its economy and actively interfering in the process of industrialization. With regards to the idea that Great Britain enjoyed a meaningful advantage in institutions (re: property rights) after the Glorious Revolution, Vries has this to say:

I, moreover, see no concrete direct links between changes in property rights and the emergence of modern economic growth during industrialization in Britain, or rather I do not see any major changes in that respect just before and during take off. In several respects property rights in Britain after 1688 were not better protected, as a strengthened central government had acquired more power to interfere with them on the basis of national interest. More in general, one has to realize that, as will be discussed later on, the history of Western Europe was not exactly lacking examples of expropriation and that well protected, entrenched property rights including patents can also be an obstacle to growth.

Vries then spends a good portion of the rest of the book laying out the evidence on government expenditures, taxes, employment, and transfer payments to support the idea that Great Britain had a much more intrusive state than China in this period.

I’ll leave you to the book for the full details, but here are some essential highlights. Taxes per capita in Great Britain were approximately 20 times higher than in China. As a percent of GDP, the figure depends on exactly your preferred source for GDP data, but taxes were again much higher in Great Britain (3-5 times higher depending on the measure). Further, taxes were rising in both per capita and percent of GDP terms over this entire period in Great Britain, while they were essentially flat in China. Finally, the government in China never ran deficits in this entire period. If you are familiar with the history of Great Britain, then you know that government debt as a percent of GDP was essentially zero in 1689, right after the Glorious Revolution. From there it rose steadily, reaching a peak of almost 250% of GDP after the Napoleonic wars. It wasn’t until after 1850 that debt fell back below 100% of GDP. In terms of the number of government officials, Vries cites data that China had between 20,000 and 30,000 civil servants in the 18th century. Great Britain had an equal amount, for a population roughly 30 times smaller. Great Britain spent a much larger fraction of GDP on welfare and poor relief than China ever did.

Drawing on the excellent War, Wine, and Taxes by John Nye, Vries also talks about the attitude of Britain towards free trade:

In the 1820s, for example, the average tariff rate for imported manufactured goods was between 45 and 55 per cent. It was only after 1850, and even then only quite temporarily, that Britain really became a free-trading nation. Overall, its tariffs in the first half of the nineteenth century were so high, higher for example than in France, and continued to be high for so long that any explanation of the first industrial revolution by reference to the existence or emergence of a free-trade economy is extremely improbable. When Britains economy took off, the country definitely was not a free trader in matters of international trade.

Compared to Britain, China was much closer to a free trade nation, declining to interfere or promote imports or exports actively.

Vries wraps up his argument with

This book maintains that the historical evidence now is so heavily in favour of industrial and military policies successfully encouraging long-term economic development in England, admittedly through far more complex means than simply setting tariffs to encourage domestic manufactures, that the burden of proof falls on neoclassical economics, not on the historic record.

Mercantilism, as practiced throughout this period in Great Britain, was not simply a fascination with collecting gold. The British government actively looked to strengthen manufacturing (of imported raw materials) and used military and naval power to open markets with that purpose in mind. To do this it taxed heavily, borrowed heavily, and spent heavily.

What to make of this? There is no necessary link between strict laissez-faire policies and growth. The first industrial nation in the world was anything but laissez-faire, and it intervened far more deeply into its economy than China, which functioned in some sense as the idealized “night watchman” state of Adam Smith. There is little to no evidence that government “just getting out of the way” leads to development. The interventions Great Britain did make certainly resulted in massive monopoly rents to small groups of people at times. So let’s not go overboard in the other direction and conclude that massive state interventions are necessary or optimal. But it is valuable knowing just how un-laissez-faire Britain was during this period.

Why did Britain take off even with all this government interference? Vries doesn’t say this explicitly, but I think his answer is partly that large-scale industrialization has big fixed costs. I want two things before I undertake big fixed investments: a large market and low risk. The British government used the high taxes to fund a military that could ensure large markets around the world, and could ensure that those markets remained open so I could earn enough to pay off my fixed cost. That military (directly or by proxy) could also actively ensure that other markets did not develop competitive industries, again ensuring that I could earn enough to make the fixed costs worth it. Without the market size and low risk, maybe British capitalists are not willing to create the large-scale industries that drove the IR. In that sense, the large size of government was necessary to the industrialization of Britain.

Markets, Institutions, and Underpants

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The title of this post is my proposed re-naming of Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton: A Global History. Grabs the attention, right?

The short recommendation is that you should read this book if you are interested in economic history and growth.

The long recommendation is that Beckert’s is an entry in the “global history” genre, this time using cotton production, processing, and trade as the framing device. But it is not just another version of Salt: A World History, with a new commodity plugged in. Beckert actually has a larger point to make about how a “market” in a commodity is something that is created by people, sometimes explicitly and sometimes not. In that sense, this book is better at explaining how institutions shape economies than most books that are specifically about institutions.

A key component of the story is the recognition that the global market for cotton was created prior to the Industrial Revolution, as part of what Beckert somewhat awkwardly calls “war capitalism”. De Gama and Columbus created direct links between Europe, South Asia, Africa, and North America. Europeans then used a superior ability to coordinate firepower and capital to ship goods between these nodes. Cotton from India was sent to Africa for slaves or South-east Asia for spices. The slaves were sent from Africa to North America, the spices to Europe. One could refer to there being “markets” for these things, but only in the sense that Europeans were trading claims on these various people or goods amongst themselves.

Beckert separates the institutions of modern capitalism, which governed the intra-European trade, from the institutions of war capitalism, which governed European trade with non-Europeans. The former developed along the idealized lines of protected property rights, secure contracts, and so forth. The latter was about coercion and expropriation. The Europeans played “cooperate” with each other, so to speak, while playing “deviate” with the rest of the world. In Liverpool the English cotton brokers developed standards of quality, separated physical location in a warehouse from nominal ownership, and created futures contracts. In the American South planters enslaved millions in order to fulfill those contracts.

The consequences of the global market in cotton were far-reaching. The cotton factory, all spindles and chimneys, becomes the epitome of the Industrial Revolution. Beckert’s implied story about innovation in this industry is Allen-like. The major costs of cotton trade were in spinning and weaving, not in growing. So innovation occurs in Britain where those costs are particularly high. But cotton also has far more scope for innovation in processing than the other major crops. It may be natural that cotton production was innovated on. There just isn’t much innovation to do on sugar once it is refined. What are you going to do, make clothes out of it? This isn’t the book to use in an argument about factor prices versus the enlightenment in generating the IR.

The more interesting question that looms over Beckert’s book is whether slavery, or the coercion of labor in any form, was necessary for the growth of the cotton trade and Industrial Revolution. Here you have to be careful about wording. Necessary? No. It was certainly possible that the global cotton trade could have evolved in a different way, perhaps with India and Egypt remaining major exporters and the American South a patchwork of small-holding cotton farmers. But did slavery and the coercion of labor accelerate the development of the global cotton trade and likely the Industrial Revolution? The answer seems to be yes. Ceteris paribus, slavery and coercion made the IR happen sooner rather than later. I think that’s what Beckert would argue. I am leaning towards agreement with him, but I need some more information before I would come down hard one way or the other.

Probably the most compelling thing I learned reading the book is about the layers of institutions that exist within economies. Beckert makes clear that there is no such thing as “English institutions” (or any other) that are constant across all transactions. Institutions are a characteristic of two entities (states, people, firms) and any given pair of entities will have its own set of institutions. So Liverpool and New Orleans cotton brokers had one set of institutions, Liverpool and Manchester brokers had another, while Liverpool and Bombay brokers a third. In some cases those institutions are “good”, fostering cooperation and trust, while others are “bad”, involving coercion. As is typical, institutions are really central to studying growth, but measuring or quantifying institutions without being extremely specific about the exact parties involved is probably hopeless.

Research on Persistent Roots of Development

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A few papers of interest regarding the persistent effect of historical conditions (geographic or not) on subsequent development:

1. Marcella Aslan’s paper on the TseTse fly and African development is now out in the American Economic Review. I believe I’ve mentioned this paper before, so go read it finally. Develops an index of suitability for TseTse flies by geography, then shows that within Africa higher TseTse suitability is historically associated with less intensive agriculture, fewer domesticated animals, lower population density, less plow usage, and more slavery (If you are queasy about using Murdock’s ethnographic atlas, then avoid this paper). Marcella shows that TseTse suitability is currently related to lower light intensity (everyone’s favorite small-scale measure of development), *but* this effect disappears if you control for historical state centralization. The idea is that the TseTse prevented the required density from forming to create proto-states, and that these places remain underdeveloped. Great placebo test in this paper – she can map the TseTse suitability index of the whole world, and show that it has no relationship to outcomes. The TseTse is a uniquely African effect, and she is not picking up general geographic features.
2. James Ang has a working paper out on the agricultural transition and adoption of technology. Simple idea is to test whether the length of time from when a country hit the agricultural transition is related to their level of technology adoption in 1000 BCE, 1 CE, or 1500 CE (think “did they use iron?” or “did they use plows?”). Short answer is that yes, it is related. Places that experienced ag. transition sooner had more technology at each year. Empirically, he uses instruments for agricultural transition that include distance to the “core” areas of transition (China, Mesopotamia, etc..) and indexes of biological endowments of domesticable species (a la Jared Diamond, and operationalized by Olsson and Hibbs). The real question for this kind of research is the measure of technology adoption. We (meaning Comin, Easterly, and Gong) retrospectively code places as having access to technologies in different years. A worry is that because some places are currently poor (for non-agricultural reasons) the world never bothered to adopt their particular technologies, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they were technologically unsophisticated for their time.
3. Dincecco, Fenske, and Onorato have a paper out on historical conflict and state development. The really interesting aspect here is how Africa differs from other areas of the world. Across the world and over history (meaning from 1400 to 1799) wars are associated with greater state capacity today. That is, places that were involved in conflicts in the past are now stronger states (measured as their ability to tax) than those without conflict. The basic theory is that wars allow states to concentrate their power. However, historical conflict is unrelated to current civil conflicts…except in Africa. In Africa, historical wars are correlated with current civil conflicts, and this is associated with poor economic outcomes today, so things are bad on multiple fronts. Here’s my immediate, ill-informed, off-the-cuff analysis: In non-African places, wars generated strong states who were able to use their power to completely and utterly eliminate ethnic groups or cultural groups that were alternative power centers. They don’t have armed civil conflicts today because the cultural groups that might have agitated conflict were wiped out or so completely assimilated that they don’t exist any more. In Africa, central states were just not as successful in eliminating competing cultural groups, so they remain viable sources of conflict. Africa’s problem, perhaps, was a lack of conclusive wars in the past.

Trust, Familes, and Growth

NOTE: The Growth Economics Blog has moved sites. Click here to find this post at the new site.

Warning: this post is too long and wildly speculative.

Culture has (re)-emerged as one of the proposed “deep determinants” of economic development. A good place to get a feel for this literature is a piece in J. of Economic Perspectives by Guiso, Sapienza, and Zingales (GSZ). They define culture as “those customary beliefs and values that ethnic, religious, and social groups transmit fairly unchanged from generation to generation.” Keep in mind, this is what GSZ a narrow definition of culture. Culture is like institutions; we seem to know it when we see it, but can’t define it.

Regardless, one of the stronger results that pops up in the culture literature that GSZ review (and often authored in the first place) is the relationship of “trust” and economic success. Population groups that tend to trust others also tend to be economically successful.

This one figure from GSZ is particularly striking. Using data from the U.S. and self-reported ethnic backgrounds, they plot “trust” for each group relative to people who report as being descended from British ancestors. Trust is measured by asking individuals if “most people can be trusted (yes/no)”. The way to interpret the figure is that the percentage of Japanese-descended answering “yes” is 24.7 percentage points higher than whatever the British-descended answered.

What do we see? The Japanese and Scandanavians are must more trusting than the British, while other Western Europeans are just about as trusting as the British. Southern Europeans are less trusting, and as we get to African and Indian-descended Americans, trust falls off a cliff. Patterns like this show up if you alternatively look at the World Values Survey at individual countries. In general Western Europeans (and their descendants in places like the US and Australia) report a higher degree of trust than other regions of the world. They also tend to have much more economic success wherever they live – see my recent post on population groups and development.

Now, there is no way for me to tell you that this is causal. It could well be that a lack of economic success leaves you less likely to trust others. But pending a definitive study on this, let me leap ahead on the assumption that there is a strong relationship of trust to economic success.

Why? The basic model here would be that economic exchange is a repeated game you play with strangers. In each round, you can either cooperate or cheat (you can pay your bar tab or you can slink out the back). Everyone is better off if you and all the strangers you interact with continually play “cooperate”. But at any given moment, you could take a stranger for a sucker by playing “cheat”. Once someone plays “cheat”, though, everyone plays “cheat” and we are all worse off. A culture of trust – and in particular trust in non-kin strangers – means that people take “cooperate” as their default option. We grab all the win-win exchanges possible.

Trust in non-kin strangers is such a powerful force for economic success because it scales so well. There are a nearly limitless number of strangers to make win-win trades with. If you restrict yourself to only your kin-group, the number of trades is severely limited. How do you build up complex networks of exchange and division of labor with, at best, a few hundred people you trust? Trust opens up economic possibilities.

So where did Western Europeans get this culture of trust, and in particular trusting non-kin? (If you already thought this post was highly speculative, then buckle up). Let me propose that the origins of this may be located in the re-organization of northwestern European society that occurred around 800-1100 AD. There was a fundamental shift away from kin-groups as the organizing principle for families towards households in this period. The alternative that arose was a “household” that centered around a smaller core of kin (the nuclear family) but also included non-kin members. This meant that NW European households were constantly exposed to, and interacting with, non-kin “strangers”. The NW European “culture of trust” was built on that foundation.

There are two books that I’ll suggest you read on this if you want to get some real depth on this idea. Whatever I say after this is culled in large part from these works.

1. The First European Revolution: c. 970-1215 (The Making of Europe) by R.I Moore. This tends to be more about the changes taking place at the top levels of the aristocracy and church.
2. Why Europe?: The Medieval Origins of Its Special Path by Michael Mitterauer. This gets more finely into the changes in economic organization occurring at the “low” levels that led to changes in family structure for the peasants. Chapters 1-3, in particular.

Mitterauer lays out the basic concept (p. 96):

The fundamental form of the European family is not the lineage group but the household. Its members do not necessarily have to be related through descent or marriage. This makes the system very flexible and adaptable to other situations.

He also makes the case that this was a particularly important social change (p. 93):

The loosening of lineage ties created some leeway for striking up new social relationships beyond the family circle. Ties to people other than one’s kin played an important part in European social history and made a major contribution to Europe’s social dynamics.

Moore finds this same process going on in the upper reaches of society (p. 70):

Upon his accession the eldest son became head of what was now conceived as a dynastic family, capable of being depicted by the diagram or `tree’ in which the European aristocracy has invested its identity ever since. The dynastic family…gradually superseded the more loosely articulated kinship group in much of northwestern Europe for the purpose of controlling and transmitting landed property.

We’ve got a process going on by which the wider kin-group is being put aside in favor of nuclear families, and these nuclear families are incorporating non-kin strangers into their households.

Why was this happening? Let’s start with the peasants. The non-kin strangers tended to be young adults. They were farm hands (both male and female), apprentices, or servants in the manor house, and they left these positions once they married. “Working as a life-cycle servant…seems to have been the defining experience of European youth” (Mitterauer, p. 94). This was not just a case of young adults working as servants for a lord. Farm hands were prevalent on most of the smaller hides (farms) that made up a lords estate.

The origin of this structure for households is located by Mitterauer in the particular agricultural system that developed as NW Europe went from being a frontier to being settled. This “cerealization” of NW European agriculture was most productive in the hide system. Simply put, there is an efficient scale to operate at if you are growing rye and oats (“Rye and Oats” is the title of Mitterauer’s first chapter). That scale is fit best by a nuclear family accentuated by some farm hands. Most importantly, you want to keep the scale of the hide constant, so you cannot have families splitting them up across children. But you need something for all those children to do, so the lords shuffled them around as farm hands and apprentices and servants between households. This is an atrocious over-simplification of Mitterauer’s argument, but I think it gets the main points right. The non-kin-based families of NW Europe arose because of a peculiar agrarian system in that area. The lingering effect of these families was to build up trust in non-kin strangers.

At the top end, a similar change was taking place. Moore does not place as much weight on the nuances of agricultural production as he does on the closing up of the frontier. He paraphrases George Duby (p. 63, no cite given, but I think he means this book):

..described the social history of this period as one of disorder in transition between two ages of order, that of the Carolingian world where a large but loosely defined and structured nobility supported itself with a haphazard combination of plunder and booty….and that of the precisely articulated society of orders, sustained by legal and social domination…which..remained familiar in western Europe until the age of revolution.

Once you could not keep you wider kin-group happy by plundering some new corner of France, you had to get serious about dividing up what you did have.

As Moore notes (p. 66), the crisis arising from having multiple kin-group claims to inheritance was not unique to NW Europe. It happens everywhere. It was not this problem that made Europe unique, it was the solution. Europe honed in on strict dynastic succession, eliminating disputes over inheritance by telling everyone in the extended kin-group (uncles and male cousins in particular) to go f*** off. Moore does a nice job of explaining how this was accomplished with the collusion of the Church. This post is already too long, so I’ll push you off to his book for the details.

The end result was that at the top level of society, the households of kings, dukes, and such were no longer kin-based. Sure, they were gigantic. But they were filled with non-kin “strangers”. Pages and servants and advisors and priests who were not related by blood or marriage, but owed their allegiance to the lord nonetheless.

So at both top and bottom levels of society in NW Europe in the years between 800-1100 we have all of these people learning to trust non-kin strangers. Perhaps unwillingly at first, but the mere exposure to non-kin strangers in economic relationships would have to build up some trust over time. Once that trust is built into these households, it gets passed on. It becomes “culture” as GSZ would describe it. But that culture of trust allowed the populations of NW Europe to take advantage of more win-win exchanges between strangers, and contributed to their on-going economic advantage.

Populations, not Nations, Dictate Development

NOTE: The Growth Economics Blog has moved sites. Click here to find this post at the new site.

One of the more intriguing empirical regularities in recent growth research involves population origins. Rather than thinking about rich and poor countries, work by Louis Putterman and David Weil tells us to think about rich and poor population groups (Europeans and Native Americans, for example). Countries are rich if their population is made up of rich population groups, and vice versa. The U.S. is rich because it has lots of European descendants, and relatively few Native American descendants. Mexico, in contrast, is relatively poor because it has a few European descendants but lots of Native American descendants.

The interesting aspect of these findings is that they suggest we are looking at the wrong units of observation, so to speak, in studying economic growth and development. We should be studying the characteristics of population groups, not countries, and looking at the characteristics that make those groups prosperous relative to others.

I pulled two sets of results out of the survey by Spolaore and Wacziarg (2013), which is a great introduction to this material if you want more depth. The first are regressions of output per worker in 2005 on either years since agriculture first began or years of “state history” (i.e. how long organized political regimes have existed) for each country. Columns (1) and (3) show that the country-level measures of agriculture or state history are not relevant. But if you weight the years since agriculture began or state history by population composition, you get a different story. As an example, the weighted state history for the U.S. is a weighted average of the state history of England, Germany, Italy, etc.. (quite long) as opposed to the state history of North America (quite short).

The length of time that populations have had settled agriculture and organized states is highly correlated with output per worker today. Countries that have more history with economic organization are richer today.

Spolaore and Wacziarg’s next table shows that even holding those features constant, the share of Europeans in the population of a country is highly correlated with output per worker today. The upshot is that Europeans and their descendants are rich (as a group), wherever they are in the world, but not so for other population groups. See Easterly and Levine (2012) for more robustness checks on this result.

This idea that some population groups are the source of economic success leads to reactions that run from raised eyebrows to accusations of racism. But let’s be very clear that this finding regarding population groups implies nothing about any kind of inherent superiority to Europeans as a group.

We need only a few things to hold for these patterns to arise:

• First, economic organization has to be subject to some kind of cumulative process. Whether you want to call it tacit knowledge, acculturation, or learning-by-doing, successful economic organization must be something that cannot just be snatched out of the ether. Each generation builds upon the prior’s organization to become a little more advanced.
• Second, that cumulative knowledge is passed on more easily the more closely related – culturally, linguistically, genetically – are two groups. The English and French can benefit from each others accumulating knowledge more easily than the English and Chinese for example.
• Finally, you need Europe to “get started” earlier than other regions.

With those three elements, you get Europeans with an advantage today in economic organization. They simply got rolling earlier than other areas with figuring things out, and because it is much easier for Europeans to learn from Europeans, they maintain this early advantage over long periods of time.

Further, because economic organization is something accumulated within a cultural group, it moves with them. Hence the United States gains the benefits of the long European history with economic organization, while Mexico does not to the same extent.

Does that mean European-descended places are permanently entrenched as the richest places in the world? It might. The outcome depends on whether other population groups can improve their economic organization faster than Europeans. And this in turn depends on how fast the organization ideas of Europeans spill over or get transmitted to other groups. If other population groups are both learning on their own *and* are acquiring new ideas from Europeans, then they should be catching up. Maybe slowly, but they should catch up.

On the other hand, there could be some kind of increasing returns to scale here, with Europeans getting even better and better at economic organization as they get richer. Combine that with slow spillovers, and the European population lead could not only persist, but widen as time goes on.

If you want to avoid this spiral of divergence, then this literature implies three possible actions. (1) import Europeans, (2) export your people to European places, or (3) assimilate European culture.

Not sure of many places that are actively trying to recruit European settlers (although Paul Romer’s whole charter city thing sort of falls in this arena). Lots of developing country citizens do actively try to export themselves to European countries every year.

The last one is probably the most controversial. We can’t really tell people in poor countries to “act European”? The whole point is that European culture is this accumulated body of tacit knowledge that is not readily translatable. So how would you actually “assimilate European culture” even if you wanted to? It can obviously happen over time – there are 736 Kentucky Fried Chicken outlets in South Africa – but is this something you can actively manage?

Finally, this means the really interesting question is: how did Europeans get a head start in the first place? The research that Spolaore and Wacziarg review suggests that the advantages go back deep in time. It could be the nature of their agricultural endowments (as in Jared Diamond), or their optimal mix of diversity across groups (Ashraf and Galor), or pure un-adultered luck.

Regardless, studying development in light of this research implies studying population groups or cultures as the units of analysis, rather than confining ourselves to borders that may not have any information content about the economic organization of the populations inside of them.

Blattman on Institutions

NOTE: The Growth Economics Blog has moved sites. Click here to find this post at the new site.

Chris Blattman has put up a very nice response to my institutions posts, including a number of good points on what the institutions literature in economics tends to overlook. You should go read that right now.

He’s also added about 10 things to my “to be read” list. So thanks, Chris, for the additional crushing burden of guilt.

The Skeptics Guide to Institutions – Part 4

NOTE: The Growth Economics Blog has moved sites. Click here to find this post at the new site.

The final installment of my series on the empirical institutions literature. Quick summary of the prior posts:

1. Part 1: cross-country studies of institutions are inherently flawed by lack of identification and ordinal institutional indexes treated as cardinal
2. Part 2: instrumental variable approaches – settler mortality included – are flawed due to bad data and questions and more identification problems.
3. Part 3: historical studies show that there is path dependence or a poverty trap, but not that institutions themselves are central to underdevelopment

You have to be very careful with what you conclude from the institutions literature or from my three posts. We are dealing with empirics here, so we are not able to make any definitive statements. There is a null hypothesis, and we either reject or fail to reject that null.

So what is that null hypothesis? For the institutions theory, as with any theory, the correct null hypothesis is that it is wrong. Specifically, the null hypothesis is “institutions do not matter”. What does the empirical institutions literature tell me? I cannot reject that null. We do not have sufficient evidence to reject the idea that institutions do not matter.

But failure to reject the null is not the same as accepting the null. Having failed to reject the null, I cannot conclude that institutions do *not* matter. They may matter. All the other reading and thinking I’ve done on this subject suggests to me that they *do* matter. But the existing empirical evidence is not sufficient to strongly reject the null that they do *not*. As I said in the last post, there may be a working paper out there right now that offers a real definitive rejection of the null.

Given the empirical evidence, then, I’m uncomfortable making broad pronouncements that we have to get institutions “right” or “improve institutions” to generate economic development. We do not have evidence that this would work.

Further, I’m not sure that even if that mythical working paper did appear to solidly reject the null that the right advice would be to “improve institutions”. I say this because even the institutions literature tells you that it is impossible to make an exogenous change to institutions. Acemoglu and Robinson did not lay out a theory of what constitutes good institutions, they laid out a theory of why institutions are persistent. Their work shows that being stuck in the bad equilibrium is the result of a skewed distribution of economic power that grants some elite a skewed amount of political power. The elite can’t credibly commit to maintaining reforms, and the masses can’t credibly commit to preserving the elite’s position, so they can’t come to an agreement on creating better institutions (whatever those might be).

The implication of the institutions literature is that redistributing wealth towards the masses will lead to economic development (and vice versa, that redistributing it towards the elites will slow economic development). Only then will the elite and masses endogenously negotiate a better arrangement. You don’t even have to know precisely what “good institutions” means, as they will figure it out for themselves. The redistribution need not be explicit, but may arise through changes in technology, trade, or population.

Douglass North has the same underlying logic in his work. It was only with changes in the land/labor ratio favoring workers in Europe that old institutions disintegrated (serfdom) and new institutions arose (secure property rights).

A good example is South Korea. In 1950, Korea was one of the poorest places on earth, falling well below many African nations in terms of development. It had also been subject to colonization by Japan from 1910 to 1945. Korea had the same history of exploitive institutions as most African nations.

So why didn’t South Korea get stuck in the same trap of bad institutions and under-development as Africa? One answer is that is had a massive redistribution of wealth. In 1945, the richest 3 percent of rural households owned 2/3 of all land, and about 60 percent of rural households had no land. This should have led to bad institutions and persistent underdevelopment. (See Ban, Moon, and Perkins, 1980, if you can find a copy).

But starting in 1948 South Korea enacted wholesale land reform. By 1956, only 7 percent of farming households were tenants, and the rest owned their land. According to the FAO Agricultural Census of 1962, South Korea had *zero* farms larger than 5 hectares. Not a small number, not just a few, but *zero*. Agricultural land in South Korea, probably the primary source of wealth at that point, was distributed with incredible equity across households.

According to North or Acemoglu and Robinson, this redistribution changed the relative power of elites and masses. It would have allowed them to reach a deal on “good institutions”, or at least would have made the elite powerless to stop the masses from enacting reforms. South Korea got good institutions in part because it changed the distribution of wealth. [Good institutions for economic growth don’t appear to overlap with good institutions for personal freedom, though – South Korea was a dictatorship until 1988.]

The point is that even if we acknowledge that “institutions matter”, that does not imply that we can or should propose institutional reforms to generate economic development. It’s a mistake to think of ceteris paribus changes to institutions. They are not a thing that we can easily or independently alter. If they were, then they wouldn’t be *institutions* in the way that Douglass North uses the term.

If you want to generate economic development, the implication of the institutions literature is that you have to reform the underlying distribution of economic power first. Once you do that institutions will endogenously evolve towards the “good” equilibrium, whatever that may be.

[But the distribution of economic power *is* an institution, you might say. Okay, sure. Define institutions broadly enough and it will become trivially true that institutions matter. Defined broadly enough, institutions are the reason my Diet Coke spilled this morning, because gravity is an “institution governing the interaction of two masses in space”.]