The Quest for Development What role does history play?

“[A] country’s potential for rapid growth is strong not when it is backward with-out qualification, but rather when it is technologically backward but socially advanced.” (Abramovitz, 1986) An idea that has recently found its way back into writings on economic growth is that the capability for modern growth may vary among societies for historical and cultural reasons that may ultimately be linked to their long-run economic experience. That there may exist capabilities for eco-nomic growth that differ across countries, and that are reflected in the quality of organizational skills and institutions, was brought to the fore in the 1990s when the experience of former Communist countries convinced many economists that changing formal rules alone might not by itself bring dramatic improvements in economic performance (Murrell, 1995; Clague, 1997). The same insight appears to apply with equal force to developing economies quite generally. The idea that the economies of East Asia enjoyed certain cultural advantages over those of other coun-tries, for instance, had obvious appeal in the decades of rapid growth that preceded that region’s late 1990s economic crisis. Yet there are good rea-sons for resistance to theories of differential economic success that depend on unexplained cultural variation, and equally good reasons to resist appeals to institutional quality in the absence of a better understanding of what it is and what explains it. In this article, we discuss attempts to explore the role of social capabil-ities in explaining differences in growth performance. We examin