Comment by astrange
4 months ago
Acemoglu (last year's prize) has some.
Circumstancial evidence includes:
1. Having natural resources is often bad for development: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse
2. Scotland is in the UK because it tried to do colonialism, bankrupted itself and had to sell itself to England.
2. Ireland and Finland are doing as well as any other European country but never colonized anyone and were themselves colonized.
Colonialism is basically just a distracting game countries played before economic growth was invented.
Acemoglu has argued that colonialism helped develop European economies:
"Our hypothesis is that Atlantic trade—the opening of the sea routes to the New World, Africa, and Asia and the building of colonial empires—contributed to the process of West European growth between 1500 and 1850, not only through direct economic effects, but also indirectly by inducing fundamental institutional change."
https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/jrobinson/files/jr_AERAtla...
Where has he argued the opposite?