In Uzbekistan, Karimov could hijack the remnants of the Soviet state, which gave him a strong apparatus to suppress and murder alternative elites. In Colombia, the lack of authority of the central state in parts of the country has naturally led to much more fragmented elites—in fact, so much so that they sometimes murder one another. Nevertheless, despite these variegated elites and political institutions, these institutions often manage to cement and reproduce the power of the elite that created them. But sometimes the infighting they induce leads to the collapse of the state, as in Sierra Leone.
Just as different histories and structures mean that the identity of elites and the details of extractive political institutions differ, so do the details of the extractive economic institutions that the elites set up. In North Korea, the tools of extraction were again inherited from the communist toolkit: the abolition of private property, state-run farms, and industry.
In Egypt, the situation was quite similar under the avowedly socialist military regime created by Colonel Nasser after 1952. Nasser sided with the Soviet Union in the cold war, expropriating foreign investments, such as the British-owned Suez Canal, and took into public ownership much of the economy. However, the situation in Egypt in the 1950s and ’60s was very different from that in North Korea in the 1940s. It was much easier for the North Koreans to create a more radically communist-style economy, since they could expropriate former Japanese assets and build on the economic model of the Chinese Revolution.
In contrast, the Egyptian Revolution was more a coup by a group of military officers. When Egypt changed sides in the cold war and became pro-Western, it was therefore relatively easy, as well as expedient, for the Egyptian military to change from central command to crony capitalism as a method of extraction. Even so, the better economic performance of Egypt compared with North Korea was a consequence of the more limited extractive nature of Egyptian institutions. For one thing, lacking the stifling control of the North Korean Communist Party, the Egyptian regime had to placate its population in a way that the North Korean regime does not. For another, even crony capitalism generates some incentives for investment, at least among those favored by the regime, that are totally absent in North Korea.
Though these details are all important and interesting, the more critical lessons are in the big picture, which reveals that in each of these cases, extractive political institutions have created extractive economic institutions, transferring wealth and power toward the elite.
The intensity of extraction in these different countries obviously varies and has important consequences for prosperity. In Argentina, for example, the constitution and democratic elections do not work well to promote pluralism, but they do function much better than in Colombia. At least the state can claim the monopoly of violence in Argentina. Partly as a consequence, income per capita in Argentina is double that of Colombia. The political institutions of both countries do a much better job of restraining elites than those in Zimbabwe and Sierra Leone, and as a result, Zimbabwe and Sierra Leone are much poorer than Argentina and Colombia.
The vicious circle also implies that even when extractive institutions lead to the collapse of the state, as in Sierra Leone and Zimbabwe, this doesn’t put a conclusive end to the rule of these institutions. We have already seen that civil wars and revolutions, while they may occur during critical junctures, do not necessarily lead to institutional change. The events in Sierra Leone since the civil war ended in 2002 vividly illustrate this possibility.
In 2007 in a democratic election, the old party of Siaka Stevens, the APC, returned to power. Though the man who won the presidential election, Ernest Bai Koroma, had no association with the old APC governments, many of his cabinet did. Two of Stevens’s sons, Bockarie and Jengo, were even made ambassadors to the United States and Germany. In a sense this is a more volatile version of what we saw happen in Colombia. There the lack of state authority in many parts of the country persists over time because it is in the interests of part of the national political elite to allow it to do so, but the core state institutions are also strong enough to prevent this disorder from turning into complete chaos. In Sierra Leone, partly because of the more extractive nature of economic institutions and partly because of the country’s history of highly extractive political institutions, the society has