Populist Leaders and the Economy

Manuel Funke, Moritz Schularick and Christoph Trebesch

Abstract: Populism at the country level is at an all-time high, with more than 25% of nations currently governed by populists. How do economies perform under populist leaders? We build a new longrun cross-country database to study the macroeconomic history of populism. We identify 51 populist presidents and prime ministers from 1900 to 2020 and show that the economic cost of populism is high. After 15 years, GDP per capita is 10% lower compared to a plausible nonpopulist counterfactual. Economic disintegration, decreasing macroeconomic stability, and the erosion of institutions typically go hand in hand with populist rule.

Keywords: Populism; Protectionism; Institutions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-06-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-gro and nep-his
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://sciencespo.hal.science/hal-03881225
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
https://sciencespo.hal.science/hal-03881225/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Populist Leaders and the Economy (2023)
Working Paper: Populist Leaders and the Economy (2023)
Working Paper: Populist Leaders and the Economy (2023)
Working Paper: Populist Leaders and the Economy (2022)
Working Paper: Populist Leaders and the Economy (2022)
Working Paper: Populist Leaders and the Economy (2020)
Working Paper: Populist leaders and the economy (2020)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:wpaper:hal-03881225

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().