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A gangster has many faces: UC-Berkeley economist Edward Miguel explores how corruption and violence keep certain countries mired in poverty.

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The son of Polish and Uruguayan immigrants, Edward Miguel has been interested in global economic development since he was a teenager. By the time he graduated from high school, Miguel had traveled to Eastern Europe and Latin America and witnessed firsthand the scourge of endemic poverty. "I had seen the contrast between those countries and America," Miguel says, "and it was jarring." These experiences stayed with him as he pursued his undergraduate degree at MIT and his doctorate at Harvard. Now a member of the economics faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, Professor Miguel is bringing a fresh perspective to the debate over reducing global poverty.

That debate typically breaks down into two camps. One side believes in the "poverty-trap" hypothesis, which says that the world's poorest societies are incapable of providing themselves with even the most fundamental preconditions of...

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