Authoritarian Institutions

Georgy Egorov and Konstantin Sonin

No 19146, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: Political institutions of authoritarianism are designed to ensure the elite's lasting hold of power. They might be growth-enhancing at certain stages of a country's development and become a major obstacle to economic progress in other stages, but their primary role is to keep the elite unaccountable. Thirty years ago, the economic collapse of the USSR-led communist system gave a hope for the ``end of history'', the convergence of all political systems to a democracy. Since then, the share of non-democracies has stabilized after a dramatic fall; their share of the world's GDP has been increasing, largely due to China's enormous contribution. In this essay, we focus on institutional connections between the monopoly on political power and the monopolistic, centralized organization of economic life under authoritarianism.

JEL-codes: D85 L82 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024-06
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP19146 (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org

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:cpr:ceprdp:19146

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP19146

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers Centre for Economic Policy Research, 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().