Interest Groups and Economic Performance: Some New Evidence

Klaus Zimmermann and Daniel Horgos

No 84/2008, Working Paper from Helmut Schmidt University, Hamburg

Abstract: Mancur Olson's theory of the decline of nations is path-breaking in political economics. It has been tested cross-sectionally in numerous empirical studies. We survey the existing results briefly, with a special focus on studies using the number of lobbies as an exogenous variable. Using data from the period 1973-2006, we then present the field's first time-series analysis of the effects of the number of interest groups on the German lobby list and macroeconomic performance, gauged in terms of economic growth and inflation. The number of interest groups (as a proxy for their influence) is shown to have an important impact on macrovariables: Interest group activity significantly leads to a decline in the growth rate and a rise in the inflation rate.

Keywords: Interest groups; economic performance; growth rate; inflation rate (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D61 D72 D78 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 26 pages
Date: 2008-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-hpe and nep-pol
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.hsu-hh.de/fgvwl/index_B2pkgc9XZZkkmmmm.html Full text (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://www.hsu-hh.de/fgvwl/index_B2pkgc9XZZkkmmmm.html [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.hsu-hh.de/fgvwl/index_B2pkgc9XZZkkmmmm.html)

Related works:
Journal Article: Interest groups and economic performance: some new evidence (2009)
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:ris:vhsuwp:2008_084

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper from Helmut Schmidt University, Hamburg Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Bekcmann (wp-vwl@hsu-hh.de this e-mail address is bad, please contact repec@repec.org).