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Karol and her Mercatus
Center colleague Paul Dragos Aligica have just had their important new
monograph — Paths to Property [2] — published by the prestigious
Institute of Economic Affairs. (And my colleague Pete Boettke supplies
the Foreword.)
Karol and Paul challenge the conventional wisdom
(made popular today by certain Irish rock stars) that Africa’s poverty
can be solved with more foreign aid. But nor will prosperity emerge
from simple cookie-cutter "market solutions." Property rights and
markets are utterly essential for prosperity, but these must emerge
from the bottom up. Top-down imposition tends to produce sorry
results. Empirical examples abound, drawn from Karol’s extensive
fieldwork in sub-Saharan Africa.