Limited Access

Abstract: The upper-income, advanced industrial countries of the world today all have market economies with open competition, competitive multi-party democratic political systems, and a secure government monopoly over violence. Such open access orders, however, are not the only norm and equilibrium type of society. The middle and low-income developing countries today, like all countries before about 1800, can be understood as limited access orders that maintain their equilibrium in a fundamentally different way. In limited access orders, the state does not have a secure monopoly on violence, and society organizes itself to control violence among the elite factions. A common feature of limited access orders is that political elites divide up control of the economy, each getting some share of the rents. Since outbreaks of violence reduce the rents, the elite factions have incentives to be peaceable most of the time. Adequate stability of the rents and thus of the social order requires limiting access and competition-hence a social order with a fundamentally different logic than the open access order. This paper lays out such a framework and explores some of its implications for the problems of development today.

50 CFR Wildlife and Fisheries

"How do poor nations become rich, industrialized, and democratic? And what role does democracy play in this transition? To address these questions, Jongryn Mo and Barry R. Weingast study South Korea’s remarkable transformation since 1960. The authors concentrate on three critical turning points: Park Chung Hee’s creation of the development state beginning in the early 1960s, democratization in 1987, and the genesis of and reaction to the 1997 economic crisis. At each turning point, Korea took a significant step toward creating an open access social order.The dynamics of this transition hinge on the inclusion of a wide array of citizens, rather than just a narrow elite, in economic and political activities and organizations. The political economy systems that followed each of the first two turning points lacked balance in the degree of political and economic openness and did not last. The Korean experience, therefore, suggests that a society lacking balance cannot sustain development. Korean Political and Economic Development offers a new view of how Korea was able to maintain a pro-development state with sustained growth by resolving repeated crises in favor of rebalancing and greater political and economic openness."