Is this the Nobel Prize for property rights --- or for how genocide is the pre-condition for economic growth?
Acemoglu Johnson & Robinson https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.91.5.1369 seem to argue that in those countries where colonial settlement having followed genocide in replacing the native aborigine, public institutions were set up mirroring those back home, thereby ensuring life expectancy outcomes for their descendants comparable to their own countries of origin.
These were markedly superior to the populations of other countries where by contrast, insalubrious conditions having made settlement unattractive for European settlers, aborigine populations were allowed to survive. Yet since democratic representation & welfare measures towards that end were notconsidered necessary for subject peoples, the colonial powers employed such territories purely for the purpose of the extraction & the transfer of the surplus to the metropolitan centres of their empires, the relatively poorer present outcomes in these countries even today being a consequence of the traditional absence or weakness of such institutions. Those colonies where Europeans did not settle such as for instance India or most of Africa became purely colonies of extraction, & because there was no need to protect a domestic settler population, those territories remained backward.
Acemoglu et al have assumed that
“Countries with better “institutions,” more secure property rights, and less distortionary policies will invest more in physical and human capital, and will use these factors more efficiently to achieve a greater level of income… Since our focus is on property rights and checks against government power, we use the protection against “risk of expropriation” index from Political Risk Services as a proxy for institutions.”
In line with that very assumption they see the success of their colonies of settlement as arising from the fact that
“many Europeans migrated and settled in a number of colonies, creating what the historian Alfred Crosby (1986) calls “Neo-Europes.” The settlers tried to replicate European institutions, with strong emphasis on private property and checks against government power. Primary examples of this include Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States…”
Yet a little candour would be in order here. What differentiates those colonies of settlement from those of extraction? Yes, it is the climate, for the latter were all tropical & relatively unattractive for European population before air-conditioning.
But what is left unsaid is that in the temperate colonies, settlement was always preceded by genocide, the conscious extermination of the native population--precisely what happened in the Americas including of course the United States or Australia--held up by Acemoglu et al as models of development.
No wonder they do not discuss Rhodesia & South Africa, areas of white colonial settlement. Did they not protect white property rights, and are they not similarly to be emulated?
Don’t get killed by a colonial power that seeks to exterminate your people to settle your land. Nor let them turn you into economic slaves-- shipping out that surplus enabled by land & labour --so they prosper even as you survive to serve them.
I think we all know this? Unless Acemoglu et al are recommending some extreme measures, I cannot see what they now recommend as public policy.
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