Networks, Dictators and Underdevelopment

How should a country change its institutions to achieve social and economic development? This question cannot be answered from a purely economic view; instead, it must be understood within a wider perspective where institutional change requires affecting the whole political-economic system. To address these issues, in this book, we develop a simple model to explain how multiple institutional equilibria could arise in a small open economy, studying how the distribution of political power among four different kinds of agents (capitalists, skilled workers, unskilled workers and ¿grabbers,¿ which are rent-seeking elites, endemic in many underdeveloped countries) could generate either a productive or a rent-seeking equilibrium. As the distribution of political power in a society is so crucial to understanding institutional equilibria, the second part of the book is dedicated to apply the concept of networks to explain this distribution. For that, a game theoretic model is formulated in which both the occurrence and success of an uprising by the citizens against a dictator depend on the characteristics of the communication network that connects the citizens.