Linda Yueh

[size=0.8em]Fellow in Economics at St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford;

[size=0.8em] Adjunct Professor of Economics, London Business School,

[size=0.8em]and Visiting Senior Fellow at LSE's IDEAS research centre

  Between 1960 and 2008, only a dozen or so middle-income countries became prosperous. This column explores the factors affecting how and why some countries become prosperous, while others fail. Consistent with the theories of New Institutional Economics, economies that adopted the economic policies and institutional reforms of successful countries enjoyed the largest increases in prosperity. These successes point to the advantages of looking beyond the economic staples of capital, labour, and technology in fashioning growth policies.