We estimate the respective contributions of institutions, geography, and trade in determining income levels around the world, using recently developed instrumental variables for institutions and trade. Our results indicate that the quality of institutions "trumps" everything else. Once institutions are controlled for, conventional measures of geography have at best weak direct effects on incomes, although they have a strong indirect effect by influencing the quality of institutions. Similarly, once institutions are controlled for, trade is almost always insignificant, and often enters the income equation with the "wrong" (i.e., negative) sign. We relate our results to recent literature, and where differences exist, trace their origins to choices on samples, specification, and instrumentation.The views expressed in this paper are the authors' own and not of the institutions with which they are affiliated. We thank three referees, Chad Jones, James Robinson, Will Masters, and participants at the Harvard-MIT development seminar, joint IMF-World Bank Seminar, and the Harvard econometrics workshop for their comments, Daron Acemoglu for helpful conversations, and Simon Johnson for providing us with his data. Dani Rodrik gratefully acknowledges support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

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I show that undervaluation of the currency (a high real exchange rate) stimulates economic growth. This is true particularly for developing countries. This finding is robust to using different measures of the real exchange rate and different estimation techniques. I also provide some evidence that the operative channel is the size of the tradable sector (especially industry). These results suggest that tradables suffer disproportionately from the government or market failures that keep poor countries from converging toward countries with higher incomes. I present two categories of explanations for why this may be so, the first focusing on institutional weaknesses, and the second on product-market failures. A formal model elucidates the linkages between the real exchange rate and the rate of economic growth.

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It isn't what we don't know that kills us.It's what we know that ain't so.-Mark Twain

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We estimate the respective contributions of institutions, geography, and trade in determining income levels around the world, using recently developed instrumental variables for institutions and trade. Our results indicate that the quality of institutions "trumps" everything else. Once institutions are controlled for, conventional measures of geography have at best weak direct effects on incomes, although they have a strong indirect effect by influencing the quality of institutions. Similarly, once institutions are controlled for, trade is almost always insignificant, and often enters the income equation with the "wrong" (i.e., negative) sign. We relate our results to recent literature, and where differences exist, trace their origins to choices on samples, specification, and instrumentation.The views expressed in this paper are the authors' own and not of the institutions with which they are affiliated. We thank three referees, Chad Jones, James Robinson, Will Masters, and participants at the Harvard-MIT development seminar, joint IMF-World Bank Seminar, and the Harvard econometrics workshop for their comments, Daron Acemoglu for helpful conversations, and Simon Johnson for providing us with his data. Dani Rodrik gratefully acknowledges support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

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