The purpose of this paper is to analyse the effects of natural resources on income inequality conditional on economic complexity in 111 developed and developing countries from 1995 to 2016. The system-GMM results show that economic complexity reverses the positive effects of natural resource dependence on income inequality. Furthermore, results are robust to the distinction between dependence on point resources (fossil fuels, ores, and metals), dependence on diffuse resources (agricultural raw material), and resource abundance. Finally, there are significant differences between countries, depending on the level of ethnic fragmentation and democracy.

For path-breaking insights on how prices can guide the efficient allocation of resources and how innovation and investment can spur economic growth, Adam Smith is justly renowned. He was, however, well aware of problems posed by market dominance—specifically in banking and, more generally, wherever getting to the scale that delivers increasing returns leads to monopolistic behaviour. For the historical record, we draw on the recent wide-ranging survey by Acemoglu and Johnson on how the benefits of innovation have been spread across society since the Industrial Revolution. We also consider these issues in the context of geo-political competition.

Youth unemployment rates in most countries are considerably higher than total unemployment rates and increased significantly in many countries following the global financial crisis. Young people in long-term unemployment risk becoming a ‘lost generation’. We investigate individual and family characteristics predicting young people’s vulnerability to the scarring effects of long-term unemployment. After overviewing aggregate youth unemployment trends in several European countries, we focus on Russia and Italy – countries with contrasting structural and institutional conditions and exhibiting different macroeconomic trends – in order to determine whether, despite these differences, there were similar patterns in the relationship between individual and family characteristics and the of risk of unemployment and its adverse impacts. We use a Heckman probit model to estimate the unemployment risk of young people – compared to adults – during the period 2004–2011, before and after the global financial crisis. Despite many differences between the two countries, most of the explanatory variables acted in the same direction in each and so we compare the relative size of such effects. The policy significance of the findings is that personal and family characteristics are more amenable to modification than macroeconomic variables. Specific school-to-work interventions are needed to avoid creating a ‘lost generation’.

The experience of industry policy in the wider Asian region contrasts significantly with many of the neoliberal policy prescriptions prevalent in Australia today. Using the automotive industry as a comparative case study, this article compares industry policy in three demographic and geographic giants of the region: China, India and Indonesia. China’s dominant position has benefited from a highly ‘interventionist’ industry policy which places strict conditions on foreign carmakers in joint ventures. This policy has also influenced the emergence of a thriving domestic industry, with state-owned enterprises leading the way. While India has also emerged as a major auto producer, its industry policy has moved away from the joint venture model since the 1990s, with fully foreign-owned operations now playing a much bigger role. In contrast, Indonesia retains a version of the joint venture model while local industry is dominated by Japanese capital. The record of industry policy in these countries challenges the idea that more ‘liberal’ economic systems lead to stronger domestic industries or firms.

This article analyzes the impact of Augusto Pinochet’s autocracy on the Chilean economy. The study compares outcomes under Pinochet’s leadership with those in a synthetic counterfactual made of a weighted average of countries with similar characteristics. It finds that, relative to the control, Chilean income per capita greatly underperformed for at least the first fifteen years after Pinochet’s coup. The results are robust to extending the pool of donor countries and expanding the pretreatment period by switching data sets to capture potential heterogeneity of effects. The evidence suggests that Chile’s remarkable economic growth during the period 1985–1997 did not depend on Pinochet’s autocracy. These results further bring into question the effectiveness of the regime to enhance economic growth and the narrative of the Chilean miracle.

For some 25 years in revolutionary Haiti, most of the productive land was nationalized and run as state property. This paper shows that this economic system can be accurately described as agrarian socialism. Its life and death are compared with the experiences of 20th-century socialist regimes and their transition to a market economy, paying special attention to the kindred case of São Tomé. Haitian socialism is interesting because it was the unintended, accidental product of an emergency situation: the killing or flight of all the French landlords, which made their land vacant property and drove the state to run it in the public interest to defend the revolution. Therefore, it can be read as a natural experiment in socialism in the absence of a socialist ideology and of a socialist party that could hold the system together, constrain its income distribution, and control its eventual privatization.

To what extent do imposed institutions shape preferences? We consider this issue by comparing the market-versus-state attitudes of respondents from a capitalist country, Finland, and from an ex-communist group of Baltic countries, and by arguing that the period of communist rule can be viewed as an ‘experiment’ in institutional imposition. We find that, consistent with some earlier related work, citizens from ex-communist countries tend to be more supportive of state ownership than respondents from capitalist economies. However, they also favour increasing inequality and competition as the means to enhance incentives. We conclude that, in some important relevant dimensions, institutional imposition (which lasted for about 50 years) had a limited effect on preferences.