Economic History of Puerto Rico: Institutional Change and Capitalist Development

Complementarity and institutional change in capitalist systems

The concept of institutional complementarity – that the co-existence of two or more institutions enhances the functioning of each – is frequently used to explain why institutions are resistant to change and why introducing new institutions into a system often fails to achieve the intended objective. This paper utilizes examples from comparative political economy to delineate the concept and add...

Economic Cost of Dengue in Puerto Rico

Dengue, endemic in Puerto Rico, reached a record high in 2010. To inform policy makers, we derived annual economic cost. We assessed direct and indirect costs of hospitalized and ambulatory dengue illness in 2010 dollars through surveillance data and interviews with 100 laboratory-confirmed dengue patients treated in 2008-2010. We corrected for underreporting by using setting-specific expansion...

Puerto Rico

of America, Children's Defense Fund, and Generations United have partnered to produce state and national GrandFacts fact sheets for grandparents and other relatives raising children. The state fact sheets include state-specific data and programs as well as information about foster care, public benefits, educational assistance and state laws. Visit www.grandfactsheets.org to find this and all Gr...

University of Puerto Rico

Paths of Institutional Development: A View from Economic History

This article surveys an influential new research program on historical paths of institutional development and their consequences for growth. The research program exploits the experience of European colonialism as a natural experiment whose results bear on the way institutions affect development. The central hypothesis of this research is that societies that began with more extreme inequality we...