This graph, from a paper by Gallup, Sachs and Mellinger, is taken from an Econbrowser blog post by James Hamilton. Go there and read it. Interesting stuff. I will add, however, that it does read a bit like the rediscovery of the wheel: economic geographers and development economists have been studying all this stuff (the role of geography versus institutions, resources and the like) for decades.
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As an actual geographer, I can assure you that that sort of thing happens to us all the time. Though it does seem that economists are worse at it than those in other disciplines.
A similar thing happened to Climatology [a Geography sub-discipline], which was traditionally ignored by Meteorologists, who were much more interested in predicting the weather, until Climatologists discovered the mechanisms of global warming, and all that grant money came flooding in. Now Meteorology thinks they did the whole thing...
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