10 Reasons Countries Fall Apart
►http://www.globalpolicy.org/component/content/article/173-sovereign/52061-10-reasons-countries-fall-apart.html
By Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson
Foreign Policy
July/August 2012
Economists Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, authors of Why Nation Fails, bring an interesting perspective to the question of “failed states” by focusing on domestic institutions and the role of political and economic elites. By giving concrete examples of what they call “extractive” economic institutions, they shed light on the following disincentives to growth: the endemic lack of property rights in North Korea, forced labor and coercion in Uzbekistan, the former professional caste system in apartheid South Africa, the elite’s monopolistic control of the economy in Mubarak’s Egypt or its rejection of new technologies in 19th Century Russia and Austria, the absence of effective centralized state and system of laws in Somalia, the government’s weak control over the territory in Colombia or its inability to provide public services in Peru, the political exploitation of rural populations in Bolivia, and the intense extraction of natural resources in Sierra Leone. While these are undoubtedly central to understand why some states fall apart, the two economists only present part of the picture, as they tend to neglect that these countries are not isolated but included in complex geopolitical dynamics.