Law tradition of a country is associated with its institutional quality. Countries with a French Civil code tradition display a negative link with bureaucratic development, lack of corruption, credibility of governments and others. Results are maintained even after controlling for regional and colonial variables and, in general, appear robust. Countries with a Common Law tradition show a positive relationship with institutional quality, though not as robust when testing a broad range of specifications. These results are consistent with the hypothesis of Scully, Posner and others, that link origin of laws and economic behaviour. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This article analyzes the behavior of current account deficits in Africa. The findings are that deficits are (i) not very persistent; (ii) positively linked with domestic growth; (iii) strongly linked with public (and private) savings, suggesting that fiscal consolidation in IMF-supported programs may be relatively effective; (iv) linked with aid flows, so as to close the external gap; and (v) linked with currency depreciation and the terms of trade.

A n empirical regularity in the epidemiology literature is that the spread of infectious epidemics in the population tends to follow a logistic pattern. In the first stage, the rate of contagion is low, and thus the number of infected individuals remains relatively stable. The second stage occurs when a critical number of individuals become infected, so that once this threshold is reached, the rate of infection accelerates rapidly, and, consequently, the number of infected cases increases dramatically. In particular, Geoffard and Philipson (1995) explain that "the larger the fraction of infected people in the population, the larger the fraction of uninfected people who will become infected in the next period, since the 426

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. The views and interpretations in this document are those of the authors and should not be attributed to the Inter-American Development Bank, or to any individual acting on its behalf. Terms of use: Documents inThe Research Department (RES) produces the Latin American Economic Policies Newsletter, as well as working papers and books, on diverse economic issues.To obtain a complete list of RES publications and read or download them please visit our web site at: http://www.iadb.org/res/32.htm 3 Abstract 1 This paper explores the institutional determinants of economic growth in Latin America by taking advantage of recent empirical research that employs subjective and objective measures to test for a possible "Northian" explanation that links institutional quality and economic growth. I provide a framework that helps better understand the policymakers' choices and persistence regarding inward-looking policies that were pursued between the 1930s and the 1980s by arguing that in the Latin American case Olson's (1982) idea of encompassing interest should be expanded to cover not only the economic stakes of power holders, but also, their political stakes, somewhat along the lines of work by Robinson (1997).JEL Classification: N16, N46, O10

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. The views and interpretations in this document are those of the authors and should not be attributed to the Inter-American Development Bank, or to any individual acting on its behalf. Terms of use: Documents inThe Research Department (RES) produces the Latin American Economic Policies Newsletter, as well as working papers and books, on diverse economic issues.To obtain a complete list of RES publications and read or download them please visit our web site at: http://www.iadb.org/res/32.htm 3 Abstract 1 This paper explores the institutional determinants of economic growth in Latin America by taking advantage of recent empirical research that employs subjective and objective measures to test for a possible "Northian" explanation that links institutional quality and economic growth. I provide a framework that helps better understand the policymakers' choices and persistence regarding inward-looking policies that were pursued between the 1930s and the 1980s by arguing that in the Latin American case Olson's (1982) idea of encompassing interest should be expanded to cover not only the economic stakes of power holders, but also, their political stakes, somewhat along the lines of work by Robinson (1997).JEL Classification: N16, N46, O10