It's hard to know which development economics theories to buy

Scott Summer recently published a fairly long blog post on development economics. It’s very good. His conclusions are similar to mine. There are many purported explanations of why some countries developed faster than others. It’s hard to have any confidence in which one is correct.

One of the most important questions in the world is what makes economic development happen. Why do some nations develop faster than others. Why is East Asia so rich when Africa is so poor, despite coming form a fairly similar starting point in the 1940’s? A selection of popular explanations I’ve read/heard over the years:

• Deep culture (Confucianism, history of statehood)
• Infant industry protection/import substitution
• State led development and strategy
• Free markets and allowing private business to operate + seeking FDI
• Breaking up large farms in favor of smaller plots = higher productivity as developing nations have a surplus of low-skill human capital. This gives $ to spend in development.
• Institution transfer from more successful developed nations (SK was colonize by Japan. Dictator and elite emulated Japanese economic policy. Japan had a constitution imposed by the USA, hong kong and Singapore were British etc…)
• Genetics and population IQ
• investing in education
• unified nation states with a history of statehood

One problem I run into when reading various more popular books on this is that they all seem persuasive in isolation. While reading How Asia Works, I found myself nodding along to the general narrative of “Big farms bad, financialization bad”. Bad Samaritans also sounded plausible, with it’s central idea of companies needing protection from competition for a while before they could possible hope to compete with giants. Ditto for a bunch of books/papers/blog posts. I think the core issue here is that it’s a space with a small number of data points (only 150 or so nations) and a huge number of free variables. There will inevitably be commonalities between successful countries. It’s just very hard to know which ones are spurious correlation, which ones are caused by growth and which ones cause growth.

I guess one thing you could do is try to do difference in difference studies. The institutionalist/deep roots people have claimed some success with this. e.g: Showing how areas of Brazil where slavery was vs was not permitted still had different characteristics 200 years later. But yeah, many of the development policy explanations are national and so diff in diff doesn’t really work.