Nathan Nunn: evaluation

Transcript context

…Why does distance from the equator seem to predict GDP per capita so well? It’s not obvious it should matter at all, right? Yep, that’s right. There’s a time, I think when I was in grad school, this was one of the great questions that the profession was trying to deal with. There’s a lot of explanations. One is pure geography. Malaria is bad, for example. Sleeping sickness is bad. And those are more prevalent closer to the equator — that would be the Jeffrey Sachs view. The other one is, while history is important and those places — for the Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson view — those places had less settlement of Europeans. An extractive strategy was employed rather than a strategy where you build local institutions and try to improve the society. Personally, I think there seems to be more evidence for the historical view, although I don’t know that that one story explains everything. I think there’s a lot of other reasons why historical geography would have been important. What can Africa do to overcome the limitations of having so many landlocked countries?…

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