Even today, countries such as Afghanistan, Haiti, and Nepal have national states that lack political centralization. In sub-Saharan Africa the situation is even worse. As we argued earlier, without a centralized state to provide order and enforce rules and property rights, inclusive institutions could not emerge. We will see in this chapter that in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa (for example, Somalia and southern Sudan) a major barrier to industrialization was the lack of any form of political centralization.
