 Does economic liberalization increase government accountability?Veeshan Rayamajhee and Raymond J. March Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2025, vol. 237, issue C Abstract: This paper examines the impact of economic liberalization on government accountability. Using a country-level panel spanning 1900-2020 from the V-DEM dataset, we exploit discrete and sustained jumps in state ownership and control of the economy to identify instances of reforms toward economic liberalization. We use a doubly-robust staggered difference-in-differences approach on stacked data and find a sizable and positive relationship between economic liberalization and government accountability. We further identify three channels through which capitalistic reforms improve government accountability: greater media independence and representation, stronger civil society participation, and broader inclusion of diverse elite groups, all of which impose checks on governmental power. Our results are robust to a host of robustness checks including exclusion of different geo-political regions and historical episodes as well as alternative treatment definitions. Keywords: Economic liberalization; Property rights; Government accountability; Civil society; Media freedom (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jeborg:v:237:y:2025:i:c:s0167268125002628 DOI: 10.1016/j.jebo.2025.107143 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization is currently edited by Houser, D. and Puzzello, D. More articles in Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization from Elsevier |
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