Prof. Ben Ross Schneider
(Ford International Professor of Political Science und Direktor des MIT Brazil program, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge MA):

The Middle Income Trap: More Politics than Economics

Economists have reached a consensus on the existence of a middle income trap but have yet to analyze, much less theorize, the politics of this trap. We argue that the trap has two core components. First, the policies necessary to upgrade productivity, as in human capital and innovation, require enormous investment in institutional capacity. Second, these institutional challenges come just at the time when political demands for, and ability to supply, these institutions are weak. Politics in particular are stalled by fractured social groups (especially business and labor, and inequality generally). These conditions resulted in large measure from previous trajectories of growth. The empirical analysis concentrates on nine larger Middle Income countries.