After glancing at the study [and after editing again after RobinZ’s comment]:
It criticizes other studies for not controlling for such details as ethnolinguistic fractionalization, religion, natural resource abundance, or the wealth of neighboring countries. It’s full of references to other variables that ought to be controlled for, like climate, resource-richness, and social mores. But the only thing this study claims to control for is initial wealth.
Much of the article lists rankings of growth rates that control for nothing at all. It has a large initial section claiming that communism performed well because a bunch of Communist countries that started out poor, grew faster than a bunch of non-Communist countries that started out rich. Then, in the other section of the paper, it claims that we can’t compare Russia to Western Europe, because Russia started out poor, and of course every economist knows that poor countries grow faster than rich countries! So we must compare Russia to Mexico. Besides the fact that they conveniently ignored this in the first half of the paper, that doesn’t make sense. A comparison that showed Russia growing slower than Western Europe (as it did) would only indicate that the difference in the effectiveness of their governments was even greater.
It says that Eastern Europe’s economic performance was only dismal as compared to Western Europe’s, and Asia; and that a more fair comparison is with Mexico, or the US, or New Zealand, or Switzerland, or a variety of other names that come up. But the cases it dismisses seem like better parallels than the cases it includes. It has a section acknowledging that most economists would say it isn’t fair to compare the growth rates of nations with different initial wealth (the cases it uses in the first section), and would instead compare the growth rates of nations with similar initial wealth (the cases it excludes in the first section). It tries to justify this, and I’m afraid I can’t now remember what the reasoning was.
It’s odd for a study to talk so much about the standard tools of economic analysis, such as regression, and yet not use any. There’s no math in this paper. It presents a bunch of graphs and argues verbally about what they imply. Also, it has not been published in a refereed journal; and I predict that it won’t be until the author remedies this.
I’m not being thorough here, and you might want to read the paper yourself rather than trust my admittedly hasty judgement. Consider yourself notified that the opinion I’m expressing here is not based on careful study. taw is a smart person and has studied it more carefully than I have.
After glancing at the study [and after editing again after RobinZ’s comment]:
It criticizes other studies for not controlling for such details as ethnolinguistic fractionalization, religion, natural resource abundance, or the wealth of neighboring countries. It’s full of references to other variables that ought to be controlled for, like climate, resource-richness, and social mores. But the only thing this study claims to control for is initial wealth.
Much of the article lists rankings of growth rates that control for nothing at all. It has a large initial section claiming that communism performed well because a bunch of Communist countries that started out poor, grew faster than a bunch of non-Communist countries that started out rich. Then, in the other section of the paper, it claims that we can’t compare Russia to Western Europe, because Russia started out poor, and of course every economist knows that poor countries grow faster than rich countries! So we must compare Russia to Mexico. Besides the fact that they conveniently ignored this in the first half of the paper, that doesn’t make sense. A comparison that showed Russia growing slower than Western Europe (as it did) would only indicate that the difference in the effectiveness of their governments was even greater.
It says that Eastern Europe’s economic performance was only dismal as compared to Western Europe’s, and Asia; and that a more fair comparison is with Mexico, or the US, or New Zealand, or Switzerland, or a variety of other names that come up. But the cases it dismisses seem like better parallels than the cases it includes. It has a section acknowledging that most economists would say it isn’t fair to compare the growth rates of nations with different initial wealth (the cases it uses in the first section), and would instead compare the growth rates of nations with similar initial wealth (the cases it excludes in the first section). It tries to justify this, and I’m afraid I can’t now remember what the reasoning was.
It’s odd for a study to talk so much about the standard tools of economic analysis, such as regression, and yet not use any. There’s no math in this paper. It presents a bunch of graphs and argues verbally about what they imply. Also, it has not been published in a refereed journal; and I predict that it won’t be until the author remedies this.
I’m not being thorough here, and you might want to read the paper yourself rather than trust my admittedly hasty judgement. Consider yourself notified that the opinion I’m expressing here is not based on careful study. taw is a smart person and has studied it more carefully than I have.
Upvoted, but I have not examined the paper—an independent check of Phil Goetz’s remarks would be appreciated.