scholarly journals Why Nations Fail? (Keynote Video Lecture)

2015 ◽  
Vol 54 (4I-II) ◽  
pp. 301-312
Author(s):  
Daron Acemoglu

First of all, it is a great pleasure to be here. Thank you for inviting me. Given that communicating from a far is not the easiest thing to do, what I have decided to do is to give a quick overview of the arguments that have emerged from the book that James and I wrote. In fact, this book is a synthesis of about 16 years of research that James and I did. I think it is fair to say that a lot of economic development and economic growth is motivated by patterns that are reported in the book. In particular, this is data from Angus Madison’s life’s work, which is not entirely uncontroversial, but the overall pattern here is fairly uncontroversial. The patterns that we observe have actually been in the background of many attempts to understand long patterns of economic development. I think they also point out that it is going to be very difficult to understand why certain parts of the world that were either on par with, say, Asia, in particular the Indian Subcontinent and China, have increased their income per capita and their prosperity so much in 500 years leading to today, particularly from the period around early 1800s to essentially to the end of the World War II, where there is this big divergence taking place. The trends in economic development show that United States of America, Canada, New Zealand and Australia have pulled so much ahead of, say, Asia, where both India, the Indian Subcontinent in this case, and China more or less show the same picture, where there is not much growth going on until the end of the World War II.

1982 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 395-420 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronald C. Newton

Between 1933 and the end of World War II, Argentina became the home of some 43,000 Jewish refugees from Nazism, almost all of them of German, Austrian, or West European origin. Measured against the country's total population, 13 million in 1931, 16 million according to the 1947 census, Argentina received more Jewish refugees per capita than any other country in the world except Palestine (Wasserstein, 1979: 7,45). This did not occur by design of the Argentine government; on the contrary, its immigration policies became interestingly restrictive as the years of the world crisis wore on.In practice, however, Argentina was unable to patrol effectively its long borders with the neighboring republics of Chile, Bolivia, Paraguay, Brazil, and Uruguay. The overseas consuls of these nations, especially the first three, did a brisk and lucrative trade in visas and entry permits for persons desperate to escape the Nazi terror.


1976 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-77 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eugene Rotwein

In the period since the end of World War II, the Japanese economic achievement has been of prodigious proportions. During this period, its growth rate—an average of almost 10% in GNP per year—has been the highest in the world. Japan has become the third-ranking industrial nation and its world standing, in terms of per capita GNP, has risen from fortieth in the early 1950s to twelfth at the present time. Growth so sweeping and rapid inevitably has brought a multitude of changes, not least in the composition of total output. At a highly accelerated rate, industries have declined, others have blossomed, new industries have appeared, and the importance of various sectors of the economy has changed. Amidst the continuing adjustments and readjustments, it is of interest to consider the nature of the impact on Japanese industrial organization. More specifically, what has been the effect on economic concentration and monopoly in Japan?


1956 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 472-476 ◽  

The eighth session of the Conference of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) was held in Rome from November 4 through 25, 1955 under the chairmanship of the Right Honorable K. J. Holyoake (New Zealand). The Conference had accepted the proposals submitted by the FAO Council on the organization of the eighth session, and consequently established various commissions to deal with agenda items pertaining to program trends and policy questions in food and agriculture, constitutional and legal questions, and administrative and financial questions. During its discussion of the world food and agricultural situation, the Conference noted that world per capita agricultural production, which had decreased by ten to fifteen percent at the end of World War II, had regained its pre-war level in spite of an increase of nearly 25 percent in population. However, agricultural production had increased more rapidly in advanced countries than in economically under-developed ones, so that per capita production in Asia and Latin America was still below pre-war levels, while surpluses had built up in the more advanced countries. The Conference felt that this situation was due to a failure to expand effective demand for farm products as rapidly as technical developments made it possible to expand production. Although the Conference noted that surplus agricultural commodities had increased more slowly in 1954–1955 than in the two preceding years, it felt that this had been due at least as much to poor crops in some countries as to increased consumption or to a planned reduction of output.


2014 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-138
Author(s):  
Jelena Grazio

The following article deals with technical terminology in the field of music. Its intention is to present a chronological-contrastive analysis of musical terminology in Slovene music theory textbooks written up until the end of the World War II, exemplified by the terms selected. The author emphasizes the importance of such research for musicology, presents current contributions in this area and describes the history of musical textbooks that have been used as corpus for the analysis.


2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 34-48
Author(s):  
Netty Mattar

Modern information technologies have radically transfigured human experience. The extensive use of mnemonic devices, for instance, has redefined the subject by externalizing aspects of inner consciousness. These transformations involve the incorporeal but deeply felt, violent dislocations of human experience, traumas that are grounded in reality but which challenge symbolic resources because they are difficult to articulate. I am interested in how the unseen wounding of mnemonic intervention is registered in the “impossible” language of speculative fiction (SF). SF is both rooted in the “real” and “estranged” from reality, and thus able to give form to impossible injuries. This paper argues that Haruki Murakami uses the mode of SF in his novel, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, to explore how mnemonic substitutes interfere with the complex process of remembering World War II in Japan. I will demonstrate how, through SF, Murakami is able to give form to an unseen crisis of memory in postwar Japan, a crisis marked by the unspeakable shock of war and by the trauma that results from the intrusion of artificial memories upon one’s consciousness of history.


1954 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 333-345 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert E. Baldwin

While the problem of economic development long has been a standard topic for economic historians, it has not been until recent years that most other modern economists have displayed a more dian casual interest in this subject. Two sets of factors have been particularly important in stimulating this new activity. The first, of course, concerns the ever-increasing efforts being made to accelerate economic development in the so-called “backward” regions of the world. Since World War II a number of the countries in the economically backward list have received eitfier complete political independence or a much greater degree of freedom. And one of the major ways they are using this new freedom of action is to plan and undertake extensive governmental development projects. For rightly or wrongly most of these countries feel that their former rulers thwarted the type of economic development most beneficial to the native population, and they are almost fanatically anxious to remedy this condition.


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