This should be a puzzle. Much of the rationale for development economics as a specialization is the thought that poor countries suffer particularly frominstitutional institutional failures in greatmeasuremanifest themselves as externalities. To ignore population growth and ecological constraints in the study of poor countries would be to suppose that demographic decisions and resource-use there give rise to no externalities of significance, and that externalities arising from institutional failure have a negligible effect on resource-use and demographic behaviour. I knowof no body of empiricalworkwhich justifies such presumptions
