VoxDev Talk
Why democracy alone does not build effective states
Professor Sir Tim Besley

Building an effective state that raises broad-based taxes, enforces the law, and provides health and education is a political problem as much as a technocratic one. Data from 1990 and 2016 points to three persistent clusters of states, but history is not destiny: executive constraints, civil society, and renewed common purpose can set countries on a better path.

In this episode of VoxDevTalks, Tim Besley discusses ideas from his lecture on state capacity, given as part of the IGC–BREAD PhD course on political economy. Drawing on long-standing research with Torsten Persson, he explains how countries fall into three distinct clusters of states, why those clusters have barely changed in a quarter of a century, and what it might take for a country to move from one to another.

Read about the interview and listen to it via the VoxDev website.