Did the death rate of colonial settlers decide which countries are rich today?

One influential paper says yes, at least indirectly: where Europeans could survive, they built lasting institutions of one kind, and where they couldn't, of another.

In 2001, Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson published "The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development", which became a seminal paper in development economics. Its theory is that Europeans set up growth-inducing institutions only where the disease environment let them settle. Elsewhere, such as central Africa, they set up extractive institutions that persist today and explain much of the variation in income across countries.

The stories behind the argument are vivid. The Pilgrims chose the Thirteen Colonies over British Guiana because mortality was lower. When Britain looked for places to send convicts, several were rejected for high death rates, and Australia was picked. In Spanish and Portuguese America, the main aim was to extract metals and other commodities. And death rates among British soldiers in India were 7 to 10 times higher than among local Indian soldiers.

In a sample of 75 former colonies, today's GDP per capita is strongly negatively related to the mortality of early settlers. The authors read this as a chain: settler mortality shaped settlement, settlement shaped early institutions, and early institutions shaped today's.

Critics object. David Albouy argued in a later replication that assigning mortality rates from neighbouring countries is dubious and that soldiers' death rates are a poor guide to civilian settlers. The authors replied that most of his objections were inconsequential to the results. Others, including Glaeser and co-authors, found that human capital performs better than institutions.