The agricultural and the democratic transitions - Causality and the Roundup model

Erich Gundlach and Martin Paldam

Economics Working Papers from Department of Economics and Business Economics, Aarhus University

Abstract: Long-run development (in income) causes a large fall in the share of agriculture commonly known as the agricultural transition. We confirm that this conventional wisdom is strongly supported by the data. Long-run development (in income) also causes a large increase in democracy known as the democratic transition. Elsewhere we have shown that it is almost as strong as the agricultural transition. Recently, a method has been presented to weed out spuriousness. It makes the democratic transition go away by turning income insignificant, when it is supplemented by a set of formal controls. We show that the same method makes the agricultural transition go away as well. Hence, it seems to be a method that kills far too much, as suggested by the subtitle. This suggestion leads to a discussion of the very meaning of long-run causality.

Keywords: Long-run growth; transitions; causality and spuriousness (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H11 H5 O1 O41 P5 Q1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 19
Date: 2009-05-19
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr and nep-dev
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:aah:aarhec:2009-06

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