Institutional Transplants in the Transformation of Poland’s Economy and Polity

Abstract

Why different economies grow at different rates is one of the most important questions in economics. Barro’s (1991) classical paper on economic growth across the world introduced dummies for sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, and found that their coefficients were significant, but he did not explain why this was the case. Many empirical studies show that so-called total factor productivity accounts for most of the observed cross-country variations in income levels, yet, although it may well be more important than the accumulation of capital, population growth and even educational improvement, productivity is ‘the unexplained part of economic growth’ (Easterly and Levine 2002).