The Connection between Democratic Freedoms and Growth in Transition Economies

Jac Heckelman

Applied Economics Quarterly (formerly: Konjunkturpolitik), 2010, vol. 56, issue 2, 121-146

Abstract: The Freedom House democracy index is often used in regression analysis to estimate the relationship between democratic freedoms and growth. The index is comprised of two broad categories for political rights and civil liberties. However, the relationship between the underlying types of rights and liberties to growth remains unknown. A newer alternative democracy index developed by Freedom House specifically for the transition nations is compared to the original democracy index. The two are highly correlated but the latter entails a greater breakdown across six democracy areas including civil society, judicial framework, media independence, corruption, electoral process, and governance. Except for corruption, each is found to be individually significant in separate growth regressions, but when all are included simultaneously, only greater freedoms in civil society and electoral process are significantly correlated with higher growth, while greater freedom in judicial framework is significantly correlated with lower growth. The remaining areas are not statistically significant.

Keywords: Democracy; Economic Growth; Hedonic Regression (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D7 O1 P3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
Working Paper: The connection between democratic freedoms and growth in transition economies (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:aeq:aeqaeq:v56_y2010_i2_q2_p121-146

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.duncker-h ... nomicsquarterly.html

Access Statistics for this article

Applied Economics Quarterly (formerly: Konjunkturpolitik) is currently edited by Ansgar Belke, Uwe Sunde and Winfried Koeniger

More articles in Applied Economics Quarterly (formerly: Konjunkturpolitik) from Duncker & Humblot, Berlin
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Deborah Anne Bowen ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).