Constitutional design and economic performance

Alvaro Montenegro

Constitutional Political Economy, 1995, vol. 6, issue 2, 169 pages

Abstract: This paper is motivated by the belief that some cultural traits favor economic performance more than others. One trait examined is the ease with which individuals in a community drift away from the spirit of the law for their own benefit; this, it is argued, generates verbose legislation and high-transaction-cost institutions with deleterious effects on economic performance. An empirical comparison between the number of articles in a country's constitution, as a proxy for length and lack of simplicity, and economic performance as measured by GDP per capita finds that no country with a high GDP per capita has a long constitution or, restated, that long constitutions are invariably associated with low levels of GDP per capita. Copyright Kluwer Academic Publishers 1995

Date: 1995
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DOI: 10.1007/BF01303255

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