Daron Acemoglu & James Robinson

by Prosperity;Poverty Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power

  The form that the Mexican banking industry took in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was a direct result of the postindependence political institutions of the country. The chaos of the Santa Ana era was followed by an abortive attempt by the French government of Emperor Napoleon II to create a colonial regime in Mexico under Emperor Maximilian between 1864 and 1867. The French were expelled, and a new constitution was written. But the government formed first by Benito Juárez and, after his death, by Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada was soon challenged by a young military man named Porfirio Díaz. Díaz had been a victorious general in the war against the French and had developed aspirations of power. He formed a rebel army and, in November of 1876, defeated the army of the government at the Battle of Tecoac. In May of the next year, he had himself elected president. He went on to rule Mexico in a more or less unbroken and increasingly authoritarian fashion until his overthrow at the outbreak of the revolution thirty-four years later.

  Like Iturbide and Santa Ana before him, Díaz started life as a military commander. Such a career path into politics was certainly known in the United States. The first president of the United States, George Washington, was also a successful general in the War of Independence. Ulysses S. Grant, one of the victorious Union generals of the Civil War, became president in 1869, and Dwight D. Eisenhower, the supreme commander of the Allied Forces in Europe during the Second World War, was president of the United States between 1953 and 1961. Unlike Iturbide, Santa Ana, and Díaz, however, none of these military men used force to get into power. Nor did they use force to avoid having to relinquish power. They abided by the Constitution. Though Mexico had constitutions in the nineteenth century, they put few constraints on what Iturbide, Santa Ana, and Díaz could do. These men could be removed from power only the same way they had attained it: by the use of force.

  Díaz violated people’s property rights, facilitating the expropriation of vast amounts of land, and he granted monopolies and favors to his supporters in all lines of business, including banking. There was nothing new about this behavior. This is exactly what Spanish conquistadors had done, and what Santa Ana did in their footsteps.

  The reason that the United States had a banking industry that was radically better for the economic prosperity of the country had nothing to do with differences in the motivation of those who owned the banks. Indeed, the profit motive, which underpinned the monopolistic nature of the banking industry in Mexico, was present in the United States, too. But this profit motive was channeled differently because of the radically different U.S. institutions. The bankers faced different economic institutions, institutions that subjected them to much greater competition. And this was largely because the politicians who wrote the rules for the bankers faced very different incentives themselves, forged by different political institutions. Indeed, in the late eighteenth century, shortly after the Constitution of the United States came into operation, a banking system looking similar to that which subsequently dominated Mexico began to emerge. Politicians tried to set up state banking monopolies, which they could give to their friends and partners in exchange for part of the monopoly profits. The banks also quickly got into the business of lending money to the politicians who regulated them, just as in Mexico. But this situation was not sustainable in the United States, because the politicians who attempted to create these banking monopolies, unlike their Mexican counterparts, were subject to election and reelection. Creating banking monopolies and giving loans to politicians is good business for politicians, if they can get away with it. It is not particularly good for the citizens, however. Unlike in Mexico, in the United States the citizens could keep politicians in check and get rid of ones who would use their offices to enrich themselves or create monopolies for their cronies. In consequence, the banking monopolies crumbled. The broad distribution of political rights in the United States, especially when compared to Mexico, guaranteed equal access to finance and loans. This in turn ensured that those with ideas and inventions could benefit from them.

  PATH-DEPENDENT CHANGE

  The world was changing in the 1870s and ’80s. Latin America was no exception. The institutions that Porfirio Díaz established were not identical to those of Santa Ana or the Spanish colonial state. The world economy boomed in the second half of the nineteenth century, and innovations in transportation such as the steamship and the railway led to a huge expansion of international trade. This wave of globalization meant that resource-rich countries such as Mexico—or, more appropriately, the elites in such countries—could enrich themselves by exporting raw materials and natural resources to industrializing North America or Western Europe. Díaz and his cronies thus found themselves in a different and rapidly evolving world. They realized that Mexico had to change, too. But this didn’t mean uprooting the colonial institutions and replacing them with institutions similar to those in the United States. Instead, theirs was “path-dependent” change leading only to the next stage of the institutions that had already made much of Latin America poor and unequal.

  Globalization made the large open spaces of the Americas, its “open frontiers,” valuable. Often these frontiers were only mythically open, since they were inhabited by indigenous peoples who were brutally dispossessed. All the same, the scramble for this newly valuable resource was one of the defining processes of the Americas in the second half of the nineteenth century. The sudden opening of this valuable frontier led not to parallel processes in the United States and Latin America, but to a further divergence, shaped by the existing institutional differences, especially those concerning who had access to the land. In the United States a long series of legislative acts, ranging from the Land Ordinance of 1785 to the Homestead Act of 1862, gave broad access to frontier lands. Though indigenous peoples had been sidelined, this created an egalitarian and economically dynamic frontier. In most Latin American countries, however, the political institutions there created a very different outcome. Frontier lands were allocated to the politically powerful and those with wealth and contacts, making such people even more powerful.

  Díaz also started to dismantle many of the specific colonial institutional legacies preventing international trade, which he anticipated could greatly enrich him and his supporters. His model, however, continued to be not the type of economic development he saw north of the Rio Grande but that of Cortés, Pizarro, and de Toledo, where the elite would make huge fortunes while the rest were excluded. When the elite invested, the economy would grow a little, but such economic growth was always going to be disappointing. It also came at the expense of those lacking rights in this new order, such as the Yaqui people of Sonora, in the hinterland of Nogales. Between 1900 and 1910, possibly thirty thousand Yaqui were deported, essentially enslaved, and sent to work in the henequen plantations of Yucatán. (The fibers of the henequen plant were a valuable export, since they could be used to make rope and twine.)

  The persistence into the twentieth century of a specific institutional pattern inimical to growth in Mexico and Latin America is well illustrated by the fact that, just as in the nineteenth century, the pattern generated economic stagnation and political instability, civil wars and coups, as groups struggled for the benefits of power. Díaz finally lost power to revolutionary forces in 1910. The Mexican Revolution was followed by others in Bolivia in 1952, Cuba in 1959, and Nicaragua in 1979. Meanwhile, sustained civil wars raged in Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Peru. Expropriation or the threat of expropriation of assets continued apace, with mass agrarian reforms (or attempted reforms) in Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Guatemala, Peru, and Venezuela. Revolutions, expropriations, and political instability came along with military governments and various types of dictatorships. Though there was also a gradual drift toward greater political rights, it was only in the 1990s that most Latin American countries became democracies, and even then they remain mired in instability.

  This instability was accompanied by mass repression and murder. The 1991 National Commission for Truth an
d Reconciliation Report in Chile determined that 2,279 persons were killed for political reasons during the Pinochet dictatorship between 1973 and 1990. Possibly 50,000 were imprisoned and tortured, and hundreds of thousands of people were fired from their jobs. The Guatemalan Commission for Historical Clarification Report in 1999 identified a total of 42,275 named victims, though others have claimed that as many as 200,000 were murdered in Guatemala between 1962 and 1996, 70,000 during the regime of General Efrain Ríos Montt, who was able to commit these crimes with such impunity that he could run for president in 2003; fortunately he did not win. The National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons in Argentina put the number of people murdered by the military there at 9,000 persons from 1976 to 1983, although it noted that the actual number could be higher. (Estimates by human rights organizations usually place it at 30,000.)

  MAKING A BILLION OR TWO

  The enduring implications of the organization of colonial society and those societies’ institutional legacies shape the modern differences between the United States and Mexico, and thus the two parts of Nogales. The contrast between how Bill Gates and Carlos Slim became the two richest men in the world—Warren Buffett is also a contender—illustrates the forces at work. The rise of Gates and Microsoft is well known, but Gates’s status as the world’s richest person and the founder of one of the most technologically innovative companies did not stop the U.S. Department of Justice from filing civil actions against the Microsoft Corporation on May 8, 1998, claiming that Microsoft had abused monopoly power. Particularly at issue was the way that Microsoft had tied its Web browser, Internet Explorer, to its Windows operating system. The government had been keeping an eye on Gates for quite some time, and as early as 1991, the Federal Trade Commission had launched an inquiry into whether Microsoft was abusing its monopoly on PC operating systems. In November 2001, Microsoft reached a deal with the Justice Department. It had its wings clipped, even if the penalties were less than many demanded.

  In Mexico, Carlos Slim did not make his money by innovation. Initially he excelled in stock market deals, and in buying and revamping unprofitable firms. His major coup was the acquisition of Telmex, the Mexican telecommunications monopoly that was privatized by President Carlos Salinas in 1990. The government announced its intention to sell 51 percent of the voting stock (20.4 percent of total stock) in the company in September 1989 and received bids in November 1990. Even though Slim did not put in the highest bid, a consortium led by his Grupo Corso won the auction. Instead of paying for the shares right away, Slim managed to delay payment, using the dividends of Telmex itself to pay for the stock. What was once a public monopoly now became Slim’s monopoly, and it was hugely profitable.

  The economic institutions that made Carlos Slim who he is are very different from those in the United States. If you’re a Mexican entrepreneur, entry barriers will play a crucial role at every stage of your career. These barriers include expensive licenses you have to obtain, red tape you have to cut through, politicians and incumbents who will stand in your way, and the difficulty of getting funding from a financial sector often in cahoots with the incumbents you’re trying to compete against. These barriers can be either insurmountable, keeping you out of lucrative areas, or your greatest friend, keeping your competitors at bay. The difference between the two scenarios is of course whom you know and whom you can influence—and yes, whom you can bribe. Carlos Slim, a talented, ambitious man from a relatively modest background of Lebanese immigrants, has been a master at obtaining exclusive contracts; he managed to monopolize the lucrative telecommunications market in Mexico, and then to extend his reach to the rest of Latin America.

  There have been challenges to Slim’s Telmex monopoly. But they have not been successful. In 1996 Avantel, a long-distance phone provider, petitioned the Mexican Competition Commission to check whether Telmex had a dominant position in the telecommunications market. In 1997 the commission declared that Telmex had substantial monopoly power with respect to local telephony, national long-distance calls, and international long-distance calls, among other things. But attempts by the regulatory authorities in Mexico to limit these monopolies have come to nothing. One reason is that Slim and Telmex can use what is known as a recurso de amparo, literally an “appeal for protection.” An amparo is in effect a petition to argue that a particular law does not apply to you. The idea of the amparo dates back to the Mexican constitution of 1857 and was originally intended as a safeguard of individual rights and freedoms. In the hands of Telmex and other Mexican monopolies, however, it has become a formidable tool for cementing monopoly power. Rather than protecting people’s rights, the amparo provides a loophole in equality before the law.

  Slim has made his money in the Mexican economy in large part thanks to his political connections. When he has ventured into the United States, he has not been successful. In 1999 his Grupo Curso bought the computer retailer CompUSA. At the time, CompUSA had given a franchise to a firm called COC Services to sell its merchandise in Mexico. Slim immediately violated this contract with the intention of setting up his own chain of stores, without any competition from COC. But COC sued CompUSA in a Dallas court. There are no amparos in Dallas, so Slim lost, and was fined $454 million. The lawyer for COC, Mark Werner, noted afterward that “the message of this verdict is that in this global economy, firms have to respect the rules of the United States if they want to come here.” When Slim was subject to the institutions of the United States, his usual tactics for making money didn’t work.

  TOWARD A THEORY OF WORLD INEQUALITY

  We live in an unequal world. The differences among nations are similar to those between the two parts of Nogales, just on a larger scale. In rich countries, individuals are healthier, live longer, and are much better educated. They also have access to a range of amenities and options in life, from vacations to career paths, that people in poor countries can only dream of. People in rich countries also drive on roads without potholes, and enjoy toilets, electricity, and running water in their houses. They also typically have governments that do not arbitrarily arrest or harass them; on the contrary, the governments provide services, including education, health care, roads, and law and order. Notable, too, is the fact that the citizens vote in elections and have some voice in the political direction their countries take.

  The great differences in world inequality are evident to everyone, even to those in poor countries, though many lack access to television or the Internet. It is the perception and reality of these differences that drive people to cross the Rio Grande or the Mediterranean Sea illegally to have the chance to experience rich-country living standards and opportunities. This inequality doesn’t just have consequences for the lives of individual people in poor countries; it also causes grievances and resentment, with huge political consequences in the United States and elsewhere. Understanding why these differences exist and what causes them is our focus in this book. Developing such an understanding is not just an end in itself, but also a first step toward generating better ideas about how to improve the lives of billions who still live in poverty.

  The disparities on the two sides of the fence in Nogales are just the tip of the iceberg. As in the rest of northern Mexico, which benefits from trade with the United States, even if not all of it is legal, the residents of Nogales are more prosperous than other Mexicans, whose average annual household income is around $5,000. This greater relative prosperity of Nogales, Sonora, comes from maquiladora manufacturing plants centered in industrial parks, the first of which was started by Richard Campbell, Jr., a California basket manufacturer. The first tenant was Coin-Art, a musical instrument company owned by Richard Bosse, owner of the Artley flute and saxophone company in Nogales, Arizona. Coin-Art was followed by Memorex (computer wiring); Avent (hospital clothing); Grant (sunglasses); Chamberlain (a manufacturer of garage door openers for Sears); and Samsonite (suitcases). Significantly, all are U.S.-based businesses and businessmen, using U.S. capital and know-how. The grea
ter prosperity of Nogales, Sonora, relative to the rest of Mexico, therefore, comes from outside.

  The differences between the United States and Mexico are in turn small compared with those across the entire globe. The average citizen of the United States is seven times as prosperous as the average Mexican and more than ten times as the resident of Peru or Central America. She is about twenty times as prosperous as the average inhabitant of sub-Saharan Africa, and almost forty times as those living in the poorest African countries such as Mali, Ethiopia, and Sierra Leone. And it’s not just the United States. There is a small but growing group of rich countries—mostly in Europe and North America, joined by Australia, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan—whose citizens enjoy very different lives from those of the inhabitants of the rest of the globe.

  The reason that Nogales, Arizona, is much richer than Nogales, Sonora, is simple; it is because of the very different institutions on the two sides of the border, which create very different incentives for the inhabitants of Nogales, Arizona, versus Nogales, Sonora. The United States is also far richer today than either Mexico or Peru because of the way its institutions, both economic and political, shape the incentives of businesses, individuals, and politicians. Each society functions with a set of economic and political rules created and enforced by the state and the citizens collectively. Economic institutions shape economic incentives: the incentives to become educated, to save and invest, to innovate and adopt new technologies, and so on. It is the political process that determines what economic institutions people live under, and it is the political institutions that determine how this process works. For example, it is the political institutions of a nation that determine the ability of citizens to control politicians and influence how they behave. This in turn determines whether politicians are agents of the citizens, albeit imperfect, or are able to abuse the power entrusted to them, or that they have usurped, to amass their own fortunes and to pursue their own agendas, ones detrimental to those of the citizens. Political institutions include but are not limited to written constitutions and to whether the society is a democracy. They include the power and capacity of the state to regulate and govern society. It is also necessary to consider more broadly the factors that determine how political power is distributed in society, particularly the ability of different groups to act collectively to pursue their objectives or to stop other people from pursuing theirs.