2024 Nobel Prize highlights role of institutions in global development

Growth is driven by technological dynamism even more than by security for private capital

The 2024 Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson for their groundbreaking research on how political and economic institutions shape long-term prosperity. The substance of their argument is found in a seminal article by them on colonial impact on development, which argues that the extent of settler mortality, or to put it more colloquially, the death rate of immigrant settlers, determined the difference between colonies like the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand and the other colonies, particularly in Africa and Asia. The North American and Oceania colonies became settler colonies where European