Economic Backwardness in Political Perspective

Economic Backwardness in Political Perspective

We construct a simple model where political elites may block technological and institutional development, because of a “political replacement effect.” Innovations often erode elites’ incumbency advantage, increasing the likelihood that they will be replaced. Fearing replacement, political elites are unwilling to initiate change and may even block economic development. We show that the relations...

Political Competition in Economic Perspective

It is sometimes argued that political competition yields benefits to the citizens just as competition in economic markets yields benefits to consumers. We consider the economic costs and benefits of political competition and find that the story is somewhat more complicated. We first review the limited existing literature on this topic, and in the process, identify a number of distinct interpret...

Economic Backwardness and Catching Up: Brazilian Agriculture, 1964–2014

Economic Consequences of Political Approval Managementin Comparative Perspective

We develop a dynamic, stochastic, computable general equilibrium model of political approval management and fiscal policy in order to analyze how political approval management affects United States’ Presidential and United Kingdom’s parliamentary business cycles. We find that governments in both systems respond to declining political approval by pursuing suboptimal fiscal policies that stimulat...

Backwardness in Speech Development

Apart from the standard exercises used for teaching deaf children tongue and lip movement, all the exercises were specially devised by the teacher for these particular children. They had to be short, for mentally defective children have little power of concentration and the deafness handicap made them tire easily. Each exercise had to involve some definite achievement which the children could t...