The main objective of this paper is to verify the importance of institutional quality and human capital on the accumulation of wealth by nations, according to an extended Solow's model. A variable capturing institutional quality increases the explanation power. Despite the difficulty of measuring institutional quality, the experiment provides results which are consistent with the ones obtained by Acemoglu et al. (2001) on the causality between economic growth and the quality of institutions, illustrating the importance of history in the growth process of a country.