The third measure we consider, constraints on the executive, is in principle linked to
constraints on government, but in reality is constructed to reflect the outcomes of most recent
elections. In developing countries, even this measure is extremely volatile, and cannot be
plausibly interpreted as reflecting durable rules, procedures or norms that the term “institutions”
refers to. Indeed, we show that the three conventional measures of institutions are uncorrelated
with constitutional constraints on government that scholars have just begun to use. All this
evidence sheds doubt on the proposition that the measures of institutions used in the growth
literature reflect any “deep” parameters that they are purported to measure.
In Section III, we discuss some of the basic OLS evidence on the relationship between
institutions, human capital, and economic growth. We confirm the now well-established
propositions that the initial level of human capital of a country, and the average level of its
institutions over a period of time, predict its level of economic growth over that very same period
of time. But, as section II shows, and the South Korean example illustrates, institutional quality
rises as a country grows richer. In fact, we find that, in a variety of specifications, initial levels of
constraints on the executive do not predict subsequent economic growth, whereas initial levels of
human capital continue to be strong predictors. Thus even the OLS evidence is quite unsupportive
of the proposition that constraints on the executive cause growth, and is supportive of the
proposition that the more basic cause is human capital.
In section IV, we try to dig deeper into these issues by looking at the universe of poor
countries as of 1960. We find that virtually all of these countries had uneducated populations, and
were moreover run by dictators. Indeed, most countries in this group have spent the vast majority 6
of years since 1960 under dictators. These dictatorships had a large dispersion of growth rates, an
observation itself inconsistent with the view that constraints on government shape growth
experiences of poor countries. The near universality of dictatorships in poor countries suggests
that the security of property in these countries is the result of policy choices, not constraints.
In Section V, we turn to one of the central strategies that researchers have used to establish
the primacy of political institutions: instrumental variables. We discuss recent work of
Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson (2001, 2002), which shows that, among European colonies,
settler mortality and population density in 1500 predict institutional quality and the level of
economic development today. We show, however, that these results do not establish a role for
institutions. Specifically, the Europeans who settled in the New World may have brought with
them not so much their institutions, but themselves, i.e., their human capital. This theoretical
ambiguity is consistent with the empirical evidence as well. We show that the instruments used in
the literature for institutions are even more highly correlated with human capital both today and in
1900, and that, in instrumental variable specifications predicting economic growth, human capital
performs better than institutions. At the purely econometric level, this evidence suggests that
predictors of settlement patterns are not valid instruments for institutions.
In Section VI, we conclude the empirical analysis by looking at the timing of human
capital accumulation and institutional quality. We find evidence consistent with the example of
South Korea, namely that economic growth and human capital accumulation cause institutional
improvement, rather than the other way around.