The Role of Institutions and Governance

Abstract

This chapter explores the third of the four major themes of the analytical framework that was laid out in chapter 1 as relevant for an understanding of the divergent development paths of East Asia and Latin America since the middle of the past century, namely, the role of institutions. This factor is one of the so-called deep determinants that has drawn the attention of development scholars, in particular, since the late 1990s, and was given a major impulse by the work of Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson (2001) in their work on the “colonial origins of economic development.”