1,487 research outputs found
Replication Data for: Institutional Transformation and the Origins of World Income Distribution
No full textThis paper presents an attempt to quantify institutional changes and examine the respective effects of de jure and de facto political institutions on the path of long-run economic growth and development for a large panel of countries in the period 1810–2000. Using factor analysis, latent indices of de jure and de facto political institutions are constructed by exploiting several existing institutional datasets. The empirical evidence consistently suggests that societies with more extractive political institutions in Latin America, South Asia, Middle East and Eastern Europe have achieved systematically slower long-run economic growth and failed to catch-up with the West. The evidence confirms the primacy of de facto institutional differences over de jure institutions in causing differential growth and development outcomes over time. It also explains why highly concentrated political power and extractive political regimes inhibited the path of economic growth by setting persistent barriers to the engagement in collective action. In the long run, institutional differences account for up to two thirds of within-country development path and up to 83% of between-country development gaps
Replication Data for: Institutional Transformation and the Origins of World Income Distribution
No full textThis paper presents an attempt to quantify institutional changes and examine the respective effects of de jure and de facto political institutions on the path of long-run economic growth and development for a large panel of countries in the period 1810–2000. Using factor analysis, latent indices of de jure and de facto political institutions are constructed by exploiting several existing institutional datasets. The empirical evidence consistently suggests that societies with more extractive political institutions in Latin America, South Asia, Middle East and Eastern Europe have achieved systematically slower long-run economic growth and failed to catch-up with the West. The evidence confirms the primacy of de facto institutional differences over de jure institutions in causing differential growth and development outcomes over time. It also explains why highly concentrated political power and extractive political regimes inhibited the path of economic growth by setting persistent barriers to the engagement in collective action. In the long run, institutional differences account for up to two thirds of within-country development path and up to 83% of between-country development gaps
Replication Data for: Institutional Development, Transaction Costs and Economic Growth: Evidence from a Cross-Country Investigation
No full textIn this study, we examine the contribution of transaction costs to economic growth across 139 countries in 2003-2012 period using 24 different indices of transaction costs. We reconstruct an augmented Solow growth model with human capital accumulation allowing for the direct and indirect effects of transaction costs on technology level and accumulation rates. Controlling for unobserved heterogeneity and common technology shocks, the evidence indicates persistently negative effect of rising transaction costs on economic growth. The contribution of contract enforcement and secure property rights to cross-country productivity differences appears to be more important than the accumulation factors combined. The results provide evidence that transaction costs might be an important mechanism behind cross-country productivity differences, suggest the importance of contractual relations and indicate their lasting impact on economic performance over time.
The analysis includes the evaluation of the relationship between transaction costs and economic growth for a large panel of countries and is based on a large-scale macro-level data collection. For each indicator, we compute the signal-to-noise ratios and use them to weigh transaction cost covariates in the cross-country regression analysis. The ratios are constructed from the overall and relative survey sizes on country-to-country and year-to-year basis upon which the covariates are constructed
Replication Data for: Political economy of pension reforms: an empirical investigation
No full textWe examine effects of political institutions on the probability of introducing pension reforms. A novel dataset is constructed that tracks the systematic development of pension legislation in 36 countries for the period 1970–2013 by focusing on mandatory pay-as-you-go, occupational, and supplementary pension reforms. The evidence highlights the fundamental importance of political institutions in shaping the probability of pension reforms, after controlling for potentially confounding effects of demographic structure, preferences for redistribution and macroeconomic fundamentals. Countries with stronger constraints on the chief executive, non-fractionalized political competition with moderate political power of government and opposition parties with centrist parties in power, and fiscal federalism in the presence of electoral rules with vote sharing thresholds and a high degree of regional autonomy are significantly more likely to introduce pension reforms. The beneficial effects of executive constraints, political competition and inter-jurisdictional federalism on reforms are robust to several misspecification checks, unobserved heterogeneity, and country-specific time trends. We show that when pension reforms occur, some layers of political institutions strengthen public and private pensions relative to GDP while others tend to weaken it
Is justice delayed justice denied? An empirical approach
No full textImproving judicial performance in order to enhance the business environment has been a policy goal for many governments in the last decades. Following the suggestions of several international organizations, most countries have tried to speed up their case resolution systems by streamlining judicial procedure. However, not as much attention has been devoted to test the potential drawbacks of similar reforms in terms of supplying a quicker but yet qualitatively inferior justice, thus contradicting the well-known legal maxim justice delayed is justice denied. The present work wishes to contribute to the empirical literature on the topic by proposing two alternative ways to further disentangle the relationship between judicial performance and judicial quality. Exploiting a dataset of 171 countries for the 2003–2016 time period, we find statistically significant evidence of a strong and negative relationship between courts’ delay and countries’ quality of the justice. While the intrinsic limits of this kind of institutional empirical analysis suggest caution when interpreting our estimates as proof of causality, we present more robust evidence suggesting that countries characterized by faster judiciaries seem to be equally not affected by a deterioration of the quality of justice, thus confirming the aforementioned maxim, at least descriptively
Timely justice as a determinant of economic growth
No full textWe investigate how timeliness in enforcing legal contracts affects economic growth across countries. We focus on judicial timeliness as a proxy for courts’ performance in a large panel of 169 countries over the 2004–2019 period. We show that, by raising uncertainty and promoting opportunistic behaviors in business transactions, slower courts hinder economic development. The relationship is robust to diverse model specifications and appears stronger for business environments more heavily relying on judiciaries such as economies undergoing rapid growth, countries characterized by low human capital and civil law jurisdictions
Some Evidence from Reforms in Europe in the Last 20 Years: Place-based Development Policies at Work
No full textThe chapter examines the evidence from economic reforms aimed at regional development in the past two decades
The rise and fall of Argentina
Full text linkI examine the contribution of institutional breakdowns to long-run development, drawing on Argentina's unique departure from a rich country on the eve of World War I to an underdeveloped one today. The empirical strategy is based on building a counterfactual scenario to examine the path of Argentina's long-run development in the absence of breakdowns, assuming it would follow the institutional trends in countries at parallel stages of development. Drawing on Argentina's large historical bibliography, I have identified the institutional breakdowns and coded for the period 1850-2012. The synthetic control and difference-in-differences estimates here suggest that, in the absence of institutional breakdowns, Argentina would largely have avoided the decline and joined the ranks of rich countries with an income level similar to that of New Zealand
Merjenje dolgoročnega BDP Per Capita Slovenije, 1820-2016
No full textIn this paper, I estimate the real GDP per capita of Slovenia for the period 1820-2016 using the indirect method based on existing national accounts and proxy variables. The results confirm the pattern of slow industrialization until 1913, stationary growth dynamics in the interwar period and during the civil war, rapid industrialization after 1952, a steep decline in the period 1986-1992 and a rapid growth in the independence era. The estimates suggest that Slovenia achieved a short-lived per capita income parity with Austria and West Germany in early 1980s which still has not been recovered down to the present day. In the post-WW2 era, Slovenia sustained higher per capita GDP than Vishegrad country group and Mediterranean countries in Southern Europe
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