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The Africans ‘left behind’

Born poor, live poor, expect to die poor unless ...

Second, geographic conditions affect the development of institutions. It is argued that
environments plagued by disease, for example, led colonists to set up "extractive institutions"

that transferred natural resources from the colony to the colonizer and failed to protect local
property rights or to set in place checks and balances against government expropriation.20
Many former colonies are still stuck with the remnants of legal systems and institutional

structures developed during the colonial period. Sizable resource endowments, particularly in
oil and minerals, are associated with the development of rent-seeking and rent-distributing

institutions.21 In such environments, if the government is capable of controlling the extraction
of resources, it has few incentives to establish a social contract with the population
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Income
The significance of poverty as a driver of state collapse is an emerging theme in the literature
on civil conflict and instability. In a 2003 study, Paul Collier and his colleagues at the World

Bank argued that low-income countries face a risk of internal conflict that is around 15 times
higher than the risk in countries that belong to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and

Development (OECD).Others have replicated their results, finding that $1,000 less in per capita
income is associated on average with a 41 percent greater annual chance of onset of civil war.
Poverty may make state failure more likely through two distinct paths. In the first, low and

declining income, especially if poorly distributed, tends to create a pool of impoverished and
disaffected young men who are easily recruited by armed opponents of the state. Economic

alternatives for such potential combatants may be nonexistent or substantially worse than
those promised by an armed group. Low per capita income also is associated with a second
path to failure. Financially, organizationally, and politically weak central governments make

insurgency more feasible and more attractive to leaders of armed groups, and they tend to lack
the capacity to impede the growth of opposition.

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Institutions
Economists increasingly believe that some institutional forms are more favorable to

development than others--in particular those that protect property rights, preserve judicial
independence, and develop the bureaucratic capacity to deliver public goods. And key
geographic conditions, including a tropical climate and the presence of natural resources,

seem to impede the development of exactly those types of institutions, thereby creating a
major constraint on growth.

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It also is clear that poverty creates incentives for the construction of weak,opaque, and

unaccountable institutions. Political clientelism tends to be the norm, with politicians using