 Democracy and Growth Volatility: exploring the linksMalik Shukayev () and Partha Chatterjee No 231, Computing in Economics and Finance 2006 from Society for Computational Economics Abstract: Our empirical investigation reveals that less democratic countries have higher volatility of GDP growth rates. Disparity in polity across countries robustly dominates differences in initial income, inequality or instability of regimes, the commonly cited reasons in the literature, as the main determinant of volatility. To explain this observation we use a stochastic dynamic model in which democracy is parameterized by the fraction of people who benefit from fiscal transfers. The government in this model maximizes the group’s utility by taxing the whole population and transfering revenue to this group. The optimal fiscal policy in such economy ensures the favored group at the expense of the rest. It is procyclical and amplifies the exogeneous shocks. More so in less democratic countries. Thus, our model is successful in explaining why tax policies are pro-cyclical in some countries, in addition to providing reasons for differences in volatility of growth rates across countries. Keywords: Optimal Fiscal Policy under Discretion; Heterogeneous agents (search for similar items in EconPapers) There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it. Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sce:scecfa:231 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Computing in Economics and Finance 2006 from Society for Computational Economics Contact information at EDIRC. |
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