[throwaway-8c93]

As Solow put it - "once you have begun to think about economic growth, it is hard to think about anything else".

After reading a lot of economic literature on this topic, my gut feeling is that endowments trump policy. Bad policy can ruin an economy, but good policy cannot make it boom. Factors like geography, historical path dependency, economies of scale, who your neighbors are, demography, cost of energy, technology or "brand recognition" - all matter far more than policies.

Finland may just as well have the best policies and the best educational system, it cannot outweigh the fact that it's a sparsely populated sub-arctic island in the corner of the world.

Economists are in the business of selling policy proposals. Clearly saying "policy actually doesn't matter all that much" isn't in their interest.