Special-Interest Groups and Growth

Bonnie Wilson, Dennis Coates and Jac Heckelman

Working Papers from Saint Louis University, Department of Economics

Abstract: This paper explores the relationship between special-interest groups and economic growth, using newly assembled data on the number of groups observed across countries. In a sample of 86 countries at two points in time (for a total of 169 observations), we ¯nd support for Mancur Olson's theory that interest group activity reduces economic growth. We also ¯nd evidence that interest groups are negatively associated with both channels to growth - capital stock growth and productivity growth.

Keywords: growth; institutional sclerosis; special-interest groups (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D7 O1 O4 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 34 pages
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-pol
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Published in Public Choice, 2011, pages 439-457

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.slu-econ-wp.com/RePEc/slu/bonnie_wilson/growth.pdf Revised version, 2010
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Can't connect to www.slu-econ-wp.com:80 (No such host is known. )

Related works:
Journal Article: Special-interest groups and growth (2011)
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:slu:wpaper:2007-01

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Saint Louis University, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Bonnie Wilson ().