NBER WORKING PAPER SERIES THE DIFFUSION OF DEVELOPMENT Enrico Spolaore Romain Wacziarg Working Paper 12153 http://www.nber.org/papers/w12153 NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138 March 2006 Spolaore: Department of Economics, Tufts University, 315 Braker Hall, 8 Upper Campus Rd., Medford, MA 02155-6722,
[email protected]. Wacziarg: Graduate School of Business, Stanford University, Stanford CA 94305-5015, USA,
[email protected]. We thank Alberto Alesina, Robert Barro, Francesco Caselli, Steven Durlauf, Jim Fearon, Oded Galor, Yannis Ioannides, Pete Klenow, Andros Kourtellos, Ed Kutsoati, Peter Lorentzen, Paolo Mauro, Sharun Mukand, Gérard Roland, Antonio Spilimbergo, Chih Ming Tan, David Weil, Bruce Weinberg, Ivo Welch, and seminar participants at Boston College, Fundação Getulio Vargas, Harvard University, the IMF, INSEAD, London Business School, Northwestern University, Stanford University, Tufts University, UC Berkeley, UC San Diego, the University of British Columbia, the University of Connecticut and the University of Wisconsin-Madison for comments. We also thank Robert Barro and Jim Fearon for providing some data. The views expressed herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. ©2006 by Enrico Spolaore and Romain Wacziarg. All rights reserved. Short sections of text, not to exceed two paragraphs, may be quoted without explicit permission provided that full credit, including © notice, is given to the source. The Diffusion of Development Enrico Spolaore and Romain Wacziarg NBER Working Paper No. 12153 March 2006 JEL No. O11, O57 ABSTRACT This paper studies the barriers to the diffusion of development across countries over the very long-run.