Legal Institutions and Economic Development

Thorsten Beck

No 8139, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: Legal institutions are critical for the development of market-based economies. This paper defines legal institutions and discusses different indicators to measure their quality and efficiency. It surveys a large historical and empirical literature showing the importance of legal institutions in explaining cross-country variation in economic development. Finally, it presents and discusses three different views of why we can observe the large cross-country variation in legal institutions, the social conflict, the legal origin and the culture and religion hypotheses.

Keywords: Economic development; Legal institutions; Legal system indicators; Property rights (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: K1 K4 O16 O43 P14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010-12
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Legal Institutions and Economic Development (2010)
Working Paper: Legal Institutions and Economic Development (2010)
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