Democracy and Growth

Robert Barro

Journal of Economic Growth, 1996, vol. 1, issue 1, 27 pages

Abstract: Growth and democracy (subjective indexes of political freedom) are analyzed for a panel of about 100 countries from 1960 to 1990. The favorable effects on growth include maintenance of the rule of law, free markets, small government consumption, and high human capital. Once these kinds of variables and the initial level of real per capita GDP are held constant, the overall effect of democracy on growth is weakly negative. There is a suggestion of a nonlinear relationship in which more democracy enhances growth at low levels of political freedom but depresses growth when a moderate level of freedom has already been attained. Improvements in the standard of living--measured by GDP, health status, and education--substantially raise the probability that political freedom will grow. These results allow for predications about which countries will become more or less democratic over time. Copyright 1996 by Kluwer Academic Publishers

Date: 1996
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (788)

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

Related works:
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:kap:jecgro:v:1:y:1996:i:1:p:1-27

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... th/journal/10887/PS2

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Economic Growth is currently edited by Oded Galor

More articles in Journal of Economic Growth from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().