Institutions and Economic Outcomes: A Dominance-Based Analysis

Gordon Anderson and Kinda Hachem

Econometric Reviews, 2013, vol. 32, issue 1, 164-182

Abstract: An important issue in both welfare and development economics is the interaction between institutions and economic outcomes. While welfarists are typically concerned with how these variables contribute to overall wellbeing, empirical assessments of their joint contribution are limited. Development economists, on the other hand, have focused extensively on whether institutions cause or are caused by growth yet the relevant literature is still rife with debate. In this article, we use a notion of distributional dominance to tackle both the measurement of multivariate welfare and the evaluation of inter-temporal dependence without hindrance from the mix of discrete (political) and continuous (economic) variables in our data set. On the causality front, our results support the view that institutions promote growth more than growth promotes institutions. On the welfare front, we find that economic growth had a positive impact from 1960 to 2000 but declines in institutional quality over the earlier part of this period were sufficient to produce a decline in overall wellbeing until the mid-1970s. Subsequent improvements in institutions then reversed the trend and, ultimately, wellbeing in 2000 was higher than that in 1960.

Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/07474938.2012.690330 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:taf:emetrv:v:32:y:2013:i:1:p:164-182

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/LECR20

DOI: 10.1080/07474938.2012.690330

Access Statistics for this article

Econometric Reviews is currently edited by Dr. Essie Maasoumi

More articles in Econometric Reviews from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().