In the post-World War II era, developing countries widely adopted the Catch-up Strategy which prioritized the development of heavy industries, after shaking off colonial or semi-colonial rule. Different from the traditional Ideology Hypothesis and International Price Fluctuation Hypothesis, we think that Catch-up Strategy can be mainly due to the high death toll, long colonization and authoritarian regime that were caused by institutional heterogeneities under colonial control, and the role of authoritarian regimes dominated. For one thing, the mechanism that public policies were largely determined by political elites led to the high likelihood of adopting Catch-up Strategy; meanwhile, local governments frequently hiding the truth due to authoritarian regime’s politician incentive schemes resulted in the persistence of the strategy. By panel data our empirical results substantiate the aforementioned mechanism: countries with highly authoritarian regimes were more likely to adopt Catch-up Strategy, especially to the colonial control.