This chapter devises a synthetic ordering of the factors identified as impeding long-run development in Benin, namely corruption, weak public management, opacity of public decision-making and policy implementation, and excessive informality. These institutional weaknesses are traced back to proximate and ultimate causes, while in the other direction the economic consequences of these weaknesses are unfolded. We identify the immediate causes as political instability, elite capture of key state functions, weakness of the state, and the possibility of easy but illegal rents. In turn, these causes are linked to five deep factors: (1) neo-patrimonialism with multiple oligarchs; (2) a multiple ethnic groups; (3) a geographical/neighbourhood landscape in which Benin appears as a small country that possesses a long border with its big neighbour (Nigeria); (4) a legacy of centralised management of key economic sectors, dating back to the French colonial period; and (5) the heavy presence of aid agencies. Policy reforms aiming at overcoming or circumventing these institutional problems are then discussed.

Among political economists, the prevalence dictatorship and civil conflict captures the central features of societies afflicted with political violence. Accordingly, this chapter adopts this terminology and develop an analytical framework to better understand why many Muslim societies are inflicted with varying and heightened levels of political violence. The chapter identifies patterns in dictatorship and civil war in Muslim societies, relative to non-Muslim societies; and how they vary across oil and non-oil producing countries. These empirical patterns motivate a discussion of how variation in preexisting institutional structures and sources of nontax government revenue (rents) may explain these patterns in political violence. This discussion identifies tensions in existing theoretical accounts, leading the author to develop a formal model. The model shows that increases in rents can entrench dictatorship, while a decline in rents may facilitate peaceful transitions to democracy or lead to the outbreak of civil war. Societies whose preexisting institutional structures encourage “sharing” government resources with the opposition are more likely to transition to democracy. The model’s hypotheses form the basis of book’s subsequent empirical analysis.

This chapter explores the consequences of patchwork forms of state authority on subnational development outcomes, primarily in India but also in Pakistan and Bangladesh. It presents two key mechanisms in state–society relations in the economy – commodification and investment – that have economic consequences for growth and human development. It then demonstrates the impact of the patchwork state on different measures of growth and human development, both between and within Indian states. It broadens this discussion out to consider South Asia in comparative perspective, explaining the starkly different trajectories of Pakistan and Bangladesh through the preponderance of different forms of governance. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the relationship among development, violence, and the patchwork state.

Developmental states must be politically strong to design, implement, and recalibrate developmental strategies. They must have the capacity to provide rents to firms that nudge them up the innovation frontier, as well as to demand reciprocity, or returns on those rents. Achieving these goals requires effective instruments of control. Analyzing four developmental programs undertaken by various governments during the 1985 to 2018 period – the Manaus free trade zone, the automotive regime, the ethanol program and the Greater Brazil Plan – this chapter demonstrates the endemic weakness of controls. The Brazilian developmental state was ineffective at controlling rents in ways that channeled business energies in strategically productive long-term directions. The causes of weak control included political factors associated with the coalitional presidential system and the weakness of checks and balances, bureaucratic factors such as the fragmentation of oversight, economic factors such as incumbent firm influence, and judicial factors such as the toothless policing of illicit links between firms, the developmental state apparatus, and the political realm.

This chapter presents a series of empirical analyses to test nationalization's primary effects on revenues and secondary effects on political survival. It begins by assessing the claim that nationalization will foster greater government take of resource revenues compared to maintaining operations by private firms. It then examines whether this corresponds to a higher probability of leadership survival: if nationalization increases state capture of resource revenues, then it should be the case that leaders use this wealth to consolidate power and prevent ouster. Beyond the survival of political leaders, it should also be true that political regimes in general will be stronger if resources are nationalized. These hypotheses are tested using the complete cross-national NOC dataset in conjunction with existing data on government revenues, the breakdown of regimes, and leadership survival. The empirics support the theory: nationalization increases state capture of resource revenues and increases the likelihood of survival of leaders and their political regimes. The results suggest that nationalizing operations explains why resource-rich leaders survive in some countries but not others.

This chapter dons political economy glasses to review Madagascar’s economic and political history from precolonial times to the present day, drawing on the theories developed by North and his co-authors (2009 and 2012b), Acemoglu and Robinson (2005 and 2012) and Khan (2010), and applies the concepts they have fashioned (institutions, social orders, control of violence and rents, elite coalitions, etc.) to the Malagasy case. Significant changes have taken place and we have seen the gradual expansion of the elite political and economic circle. At the same time, democratic aspirations have surfaced and found a voice to speak out against the different regimes’ abuses and precipitate their fall. Yet the fact remains that the system and practices at the highest levels of the state have barely changed. Each regime has systematically sought to increase its power by concentrating it, personalising it and securing the support of a small group of influential players. Unable to think outside of the short-term box, none has sought the support of the masses by trying to meet popular aspirations.

The second chapter investigates changes in land tenure and the organization of labor in the Early Roman period. It shows that land tenancy was not an imperial imposition, but had instead existed in some form in the Levant since at least the Iron Age. In the Early Roman period, however, elites attained greater protections for private property and were thus able to accumulate and convey large estates consisting of a number of geographically discontinuous plots. Tenants and laborers were no more exploited working for their elite patrons on private estates than they had been working on royal estates in earlier eras, but they did enter into new socioeconomic relations with elites. Tenants and wage laborers could occupy a range of socioeconomic positions and managed to secure a modicum of bargaining power in making contracts with landowners. As in earlier eras, drought and crop failure sometimes impeded the success of agricultural laborers. As a result, these laborers often became indebted to their landowners or other elite patrons.

In this chaper, I examine the relationship between landholding inequality, interventions in agricultural markets, and the stability of authoritarian regimes. I construct measures of the size of rents that are generated by agricultural market distortions. I show that both forms of agricultural rents are much smaller than those originating from oil revenues. I then go on to estimate a series of models of authoritarian regime durability. I test whether landed elites are threatening to authoritarian regimes, and concentrations of landholdings are associated with a greater risk of regime collapse. I find a weak positive relationship between landholding inequality and the likelihood of collapse. I look at the relationship between agricultural rents and regime durability. I find that rents that accrue to the state have no effect on the probability of regime collapse. Rents accruing to agricultural producers, however, do have a significant interactive effect on regime stability. Where landholding inequality is high, regimes that distribute greater rents to the agricultural sector are significantly less likely to break down.

In this chapter, I explore the link between government food taxes and urban unrest. I analyze an event dataset on social and political disorder in cities across the developing world matched to cross-national data on consumer food taxes between 1965 and 2009. I estimate panel regressions of the effect of food taxes on unrest. I find no simple relationship between food policy and political instability in cities. However, when the effects of food taxes are allowed to vary by political regime type, I find that higher taxes are significantly associated with greater levels of unrest under anocracy. I also estimate instrumental variables regressions that exploit exogenous variation in the composition of a country's agricultural sector to identify the causal effect of food taxes on unrest. The results of these models align with those of the panel regressions. I find that higher food taxes are significantly correlated with greater unrest, but only under anocracies, which combine a lack of democratic accountability with a relatively permissive political opportunity structure.