Business case for democracy

Carl Henrik Knutsen

Chapter 6 in Elgar Encyclopedia of Business and Government, 2026, pp 31-34 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: The relationship between regime type and economic development has, for decades, received much scholarly attention. While earlier studies reported mixed results, a few recent studies find that autocracies, on average, develop faster than democracies. Indeed, other recent studies suggest that democracies have an advantage in terms of GDP per capita growth, but also other factors associated with broader notions of development such as education and health in the population. Granted, autocracies may be better at accumulating savings and investing in infrastructure projects, but democracies typically perform better on a range of development-enhancing factors, notably including property rights protection and technological change. Moreover, democracies display far less cross-country and over-time variation in their economic performances than autocracies do, and democracies experience fewer economic crises.

Keywords: Regime type; Democracy; Dictatorship; Development; Economic growth; Economic crisis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
ISBN: 9781035307777
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/doi/10.4337/9781035307784.00011 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden

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:elg:eechap:22116_6

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jack Sweeney ().