3 Development from The Viewpoint of Nonconvergence
This leads to a different way of asking the big questions, one that is not grounded in any presumption of convergence. The starting point is that two economies with the same fundamentals can move apart along very different paths. Some of the best- known economists writing on development in the first half of the twentieth century were instinctively drawn to this view: Young (1928), Nurkse (1953), Leibenstein (1957) and Myrdal (1957) among them.
Historical legacies need not be limited to a nation’s inheritance of capital stock or GDP from its ancestors. Factors as diverse as the distribution of economic or political power, legal structure, traditions, group reputations, colonial heritage and specific institutional settings may serve as initial conditions — with a long reach. Even the accumulated baggage of unfulfilled aspirations or depressed expectations may echo into the future. Factors that have received special attention in the literature include historical inequal- ities, the nature of colonial settlement, the character of early industry and agriculture, and early political institutions.