Economic growth is the only way to lift society out of poverty and raise living standards. In this book, the reader will find many amazing examples of rapid economic growth or, conversely, its absence with an analysis of the reasons for this development of events. The authors compare the trajectories of economic growth over the past half century in pairs of countries selected in such a way that they have as many similarities as possible, including in relation to such difficult-to-measure factors as, for example, culture (Australia and New Zealand, Austria and Switzerland, Estonia and Slovenia, Mexico and Spain, Chile and Venezuela, Haiti and Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and Costa Rica, China and India, Indonesia and Pakistan). We consider not only developing countries, but also countries that have made the transition from centralized planning to a market economy over the past twenty years, as well as industrialized countries.