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FRAGILE STATES AND DEVELOPMENT POLICY
The editor in charge of this paper was Fabrizio Zilibotti.
Acknowledgments: This paper is based on Besley’s Presidential Address to the European Economic Association presented at the 25th Congress of the Association held in Glasgow in August 2010. We thank Paul Collier, Fabrizio Zillibotti, and an anonymous referee for comments on an earlier draft. We are grateful to CIFAR, the ESRC, the Swedish Research Council, the Torsten and Ragnar Söderberg Foundation, and the ERC for financial support.
E-mail: T.Besley@lse.ac.uk (Besley); torsten.persson@iies.su.se (Persson)
Abstract
It is widely recognized that fragile states are key symptoms of under-development in many parts of the world. Such states are incapable of delivering basic services to their citizens and political violence is commonplace. As of yet, mainstream development economics has not dealt in any systematic way with such concerns and the implications for development assistance. This paper puts forward a framework for analyzing fragile states and applies it to a variety development policies in different types of states.