Oh, wow, oh, oh, wow, oh, wow, oh, wow.

Oh, wow.

Oh, my. Hello, you're listening to the Science of Everything podcast, episode 107, Economic Growth and Development

Part 5, Explanations of Growth Differences.

I'm your host, James Fodor.

So this is a fifth part of our ongoing series in economic growth and development.

Recommended pre-listening is, of course, the previous episode, part four on growth theories,

and really recommend you've listened to all the prior episodes in the series to really get the most down of what I'm going to be talking about today.

So our topic for today's episode is, as I said, explanations of growth differences.

And in this episode, what I'm going to look at is finally getting

down to reasons of why some countries have experienced much better growth outcomes over the past

few centuries compared to others. So in the first episode, we went through various introductory

concepts and talk about growth and poverty. The second episode in the series, we talked about

the when and where of growth with the history of the world economy. In episode three, we talked

about the what of economic growth, which is about structural change and sort of what economic

growth and development looks like. In the previous episode four, we talked about economic

theories that model the process of growth without necessarily explaining why it happens

in some places rather than others. In this episode, we're really coming to the nub of the

issue by addressing a number of explanations that have been put forward to really explain why some

countries do well and other countries do worse. And I've grouped those under a number of different categories. So there

are cultural explanations, dependency-based explanations, democracy, geography, education, and institutions.

And I'm going to be talking about each of those in turn. Also, just before getting started,

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