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James A. Robinson | |
---|---|
Nationality | British |
Academic background | |
Alma mater | Yale University (Ph.D. 1993) University of Warwick (M.A. 1986) London School of Economics (BSc 1982) |
Doctoral advisor | Truman Bewley |
Academic work | |
Institutions | University of Chicago Harvard University University of California at Berkeley University of Southern California University of Melbourne |
James Alan Robinson (born 1960) is a British economist and political scientist. He is currently the Reverend Dr. Richard L. Pearson Professor of Global Conflict Studies and University Professor at the Harris School of Public Policy,University of Chicago. [1] [2] He also serves as the Institute Director of The Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflicts at the Harris School. [3] Robinson has previously taught at Harvard University between 2004 and 2015 and also at the University of California,Berkeley,University of Southern California and the University of Melbourne.
He studies what makes countries different by focusing on the underlying economic and political institutions that lead some to prosperity and others to conflict. With Daron Acemoglu,he is the co-author of books,such as The Narrow Corridor, Why Nations Fail and Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. [4]
Robinson studied economics at the London School of Economics (BSc),the University of Warwick (MA) and Yale University (PhD). His main research interests are in comparative economic and political development with a focus on the long-run with a particular interest in Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa.
In 2004,he was appointed Associate Professor of Government at Harvard. He later held named chair positions at Harvard,first as the David Florence Professor of Government (2009-2014) and later as the Wilbur A. Cowett Professor of Government (2014-2015). [5] On July 1,2015,he was appointed as one of nine University Professor at the Harris School of Public Policy Studies of the University of Chicago. [6] He also holds the title Reverend Dr. Richard L. Pearson Professor of Global Conflict Studies. On 9 May 2016,professor Robinson was awarded honorary doctor's degree by the National University of Mongolia during his first visit to the country. [7]
He has conducted research in countries around the world including Botswana,Chile,the Democratic Republic of the Congo,Haiti,the Philippines,Sierra Leone,South Africa and Colombia where he teaches every summer at the University of the Andes in Bogotá. [8]
On March 17,2023,James Robinson met with students,scientists,leaders of social opinion,representatives of finance and economy and business circles in Tashkent,Uzbekistan. In an interview,James Robinson talked about the construction of inclusive institutions in authoritarian countries,the tough development of countries after colonialism,the “mistakes”made consciously,and answered the questions about the so-called section “king of cotton”–Uzbekistan in his book.
He has collaborated extensively with long-time co-author Daron Acemoglu after meeting at the London School of Economics. [9]
Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (2006),co-authored by Robinson with Daron Acemoglu analyzes the creation and consolidation of democratic societies. They argue that "democracy consolidates when elites do not have strong incentive to overthrow it. These processes depend on (1) the strength of civil society,(2) the structure of political institutions,(3) the nature of political and economic crises,(4) the level of economic inequality,(5) the structure of the economy,and (6) the form and extent of globalization." [10]
In Why Nations Fail:The Origins of Power,Prosperity,and Poverty (2012),Acemoglu and Robinson argue that economic growth at the forefront of technology requires political stability,which the Mayan civilization (to name only one) did not have, [11] and creative destruction. The latter cannot occur without institutional restraints on the granting of monopoly and oligopoly rights. They say that the industrial revolution began in Great Britain,because the English Bill of Rights 1689 created such restraints. For example,a steam boat built in 1705 by Denis Papin was demolished by a boatmen guild in Münden,Germany. Papin went to London,where several of his papers were published by the Royal Society. Thomas Newcomen extended Papin's work into a steam engines in 1712,and became a commercial success,while Papin died in 1713 and was buried in an unmarked pauper's grave. [12]
Acemoglu and Robinson insist that "development differences across countries are exclusively due to differences in political and economic institutions,and reject other theories that attribute some of the differences to culture,weather,geography or lack of knowledge about the best policies and practices." [13] For example,"Soviet Russia generated rapid growth as it caught up rapidly with some of the advanced technologies in the world [but] was running out of steam by the 1970s" because of a lack of creative destruction. [14]
In The Narrow Corridor. States,Societies,and the Fate of Liberty (2019),Acemoglu and Robinson argue that a free society is attained when the power of the state and of society evolved in rough balance. [15]
Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson,in their article "Income and Democracy" (2008) show that even though there is a strong cross-country correlation between income and democracy,once one controls for country fixed effects and removes the association between income per capita and various measures of democracy,there is "no causal effect of income on democracy." [16] In "Non-Modernization" (2022),they further argue that modernization theory cannot account for various paths of political development "because it posits a link between economics and politics that is not conditional on institutions and culture and that presumes a definite endpoint—for example,an 'end of history'." [17]
Economic growth can be defined as the increase or improvement in the inflation-adjusted market value of the goods and services produced by an economy in a financial year. Statisticians conventionally measure such growth as the percent rate of increase in the real and nominal gross domestic product (GDP).
Environmental determinism is the study of how the physical environment predisposes societies and states towards particular development trajectories. Jared Diamond, Jeffrey Herbst, Ian Morris, and other social scientists sparked a revival of the theory during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This "neo-environmental determinism" school of thought examines how geographic and ecological forces influence state-building, economic development, and institutions. Many scholars underscore that this original approach was used to encourage colonialism and eurocentrism, and devalued human agency in non-Western societies, whereas modern figures like Diamond have instead used the approach as an explanation that rejects racism.
In the economics study of the public sector, economic and social development is the process by which the economic well-being and quality of life of a nation, region, local community, or an individual are improved according to targeted goals and objectives.
Development economics is a branch of economics which deals with economic aspects of the development process in low- and middle- income countries. Its focus is not only on methods of promoting economic development, economic growth and structural change but also on improving the potential for the mass of the population, for example, through health, education and workplace conditions, whether through public or private channels.
Institutions are humanly devised structures of rules and norms that shape and constrain individual behavior. All definitions of institutions generally entail that there is a level of persistence and continuity. Laws, rules, social conventions and norms are all examples of institutions. Institutions vary in their level of formality and informality.
Democratization, or democratisation, is the democratic transition to a more democratic political regime, including substantive political changes moving in a democratic direction.
Modernization theory is used to explain the process of modernization within societies. The "classical" theories of modernization of the 1950s and 1960s drew on sociological analyses of Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim and a partial reading of Max Weber, and were strongly influenced by the writings of Harvard sociologist Talcott Parsons. Modernization theory was a dominant paradigm in the social sciences in the 1950s and 1960s, then went into a deep eclipse. It made a comeback after 1991, when Francis Fukuyama wrote about the end of the Cold War as confirmation on modernization theory and more generally of universal history. But the theory remains a controversial model.
Barrington Moore Jr. was an American political sociologist, and the son of forester Barrington Moore.
Kamer Daron Acemoğlu is a Turkish-born American economist who has taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) since 1993. He is currently the Elizabeth and James Killian Professor of Economics at MIT. He was named Institute Professor in 2019.
Seymour Martin Lipset was an American sociologist and political scientist. He was the president of the American Political Science Association. His major work was in the fields of political sociology, trade union organization, social stratification, public opinion, and the sociology of intellectual life. He also wrote extensively about the conditions for democracy in comparative perspective. A socialist in his early life, Lipset later moved to the right, and was considered to be one of the first neoconservatives.
The American Economic Review is a monthly peer-reviewed academic journal published by the American Economic Association. First published in 1911, it is considered one of the most prestigious and highly distinguished journals in the field of economics. The current editor-in-chief is Erzo FP Luttmer, a professor of economics at Dartmouth College. The journal is based in Pittsburgh.
Development theory is a collection of theories about how desirable change in society is best achieved. Such theories draw on a variety of social science disciplines and approaches. In this article, multiple theories are discussed, as are recent developments with regard to these theories. Depending on which theory that is being looked at, there are different explanations to the process of development and their inequalities.
New Institutional Economics (NIE) is an economic perspective that attempts to extend economics by focusing on the institutions that underlie economic activity and with analysis beyond earlier institutional economics and neoclassical economics. Unlike neoclassical economics, it also considers the role of culture and classical political economy in economic development.
Fabrizio Zilibotti is an Italian economist. He is the Tuntex Professor of International and Development Economics at Yale University. Zilibotti was previously professor of economics at University College London, the University of Zürich, and at the Institute for International Economic Studies in Stockholm.
Oded Galor is an Israeli-American economist who is currently Herbert H. Goldberger Professor of Economics at Brown University. He is the founder of unified growth theory.
Simon H. Johnson is a British American economist. He is the Ronald A. Kurtz Professor of Entrepreneurship at the MIT Sloan School of Management and a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. He has held a wide variety of academic and policy-related positions, including professor of economics at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business. From March 2007 through the end of August 2008, he was Chief Economist of the International Monetary Fund.
Konstantin Sonin is a Russian-born American economist. He is a professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, research fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), London, and an associate research fellow at the Stockholm Institute of Transition Economics. In recognition for his outstanding research in the field of political economy, in December 2015, he was named the John Dewey Distinguished Service Professor of the University of Chicago.
The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development is a 2001 article written by Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson and published in American Economic Review. It is considered a seminal contribution to development economics through its use of European settler mortality as an instrumental variable of institutional development in former colonies. The theory proposed in the article is that Europeans only set up growth-inducing institutions in areas where the disease environment was favourable so that they could settle. In areas with unfavourable disease environments to Europeans, such as central Africa, they instead set up extractive institutions which persist to the present day and explain much of the variation in income across countries. Other theories explored in the article argue that it is the choices of institutions within the country that result in the effective and efficient use of resources in leading to the successful development of that country. Important issues with the data and analysis have been identified, causing some doubt as to the accuracy of these results.
Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, first published in 2012, is a book by economists Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson. The book applies insights from institutional economics, development economics and economic history to understand why nations develop differently, with some succeeding in the accumulation of power and prosperity and others failing, via a wide range of historical case studies.
Critical juncture theory focuses on critical junctures, i.e., large, rapid, discontinuous changes, and the long-term causal effect or historical legacy of these changes. Critical junctures are turning points that alter the course of evolution of some entity. Critical juncture theory seeks to explain both (1) the historical origin and maintenance of social order, and (2) the occurrence of social change through sudden, big leaps.