Political institutions and economic development over more than a centuryStructural Change and Economic Dynamics, 2022, vol. 61, issue C, 199-215 Abstract: Economists and political scientists have long investigated the effect of political institutions on economic development, mainly focusing on cross-sectional analyses for the years after World War II. This paper takes a historical perspective and studies whether this effect can be traced back to 1870 and how it changed over time. Using both cross-sectional and panel fixed effects regressions, I show that democracy positively affects income per capita in the post-1950 period. The effect increases as time passes and becomes especially larger after 1990, i.e. with the great democratization wave induced by the Fall of the Iron Curtain. Yet, I find no effect for the period before 1950, when the variation in income per capita is mostly explained by prior income levels, and in particular, by education. These findings are robust to accounting for income dynamics as well as to using different data sources to measure political institutions. Keywords: Democracy; Economic development; Education; Institutions (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:streco:v:61:y:2022:i:c:p:199-215 DOI: 10.1016/j.strueco.2022.02.013 Access Statistics for this article Structural Change and Economic Dynamics is currently edited by F. Duchin, H. Hagemann, M. Landesmann, R. Scazzieri, A. Steenge and B. Verspagen More articles in Structural Change and Economic Dynamics from Elsevier |
Is your work missing from RePEc? Here is how to contribute.
Questions or problems? Check the EconPapers FAQ or send mail to .
EconPapers is hosted by the
School of Business at Örebro University.