The Historical Origins of Poverty in Developing Countries

Sambit Bhattacharyya

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: In this chapter I explore the causal relationships between historical factors (for eg., geography, disease, colonial history, and technology) and poverty in developing countries. I start with a review of the existing theories. This is followed by a novel unified framework in order to causally relate these historical factors in explaining the process of development in Western Europe and the New World colonies. The final section applies this framework to explain why Africa, Latin America, and Russia fell behind. My central argument is that Western Europe benefitted from favourable geography which led to highly productive agriculture, food surplus, and institutions conducive to development. In contrast, Africa continues to suffer from unfavourable geography and disease. Institutional weaknesses in Latin America and Russia explain their relatively weak long term economic performance. I also argue that these historical factors matter for contemporary patterns of development across the globe. The chapter concludes with some suggestions for future research on this topic.

Keywords: root causes; poverty (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: N0 O1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cis, nep-gro and nep-his
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Forthcoming in Oxford Handbook of the Social Science of Poverty (2016): pp. 270-292

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/67902/1/MPRA_paper_67902.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:67902

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().