Political Institutions, Intertemporal Cooperation, and the Quality of Policies

Carlos Scartascini, Ernesto Stein and Mariano Tommasi

No 1647, IDB Publications (Working Papers) from Inter-American Development Bank

Abstract: While economists have tended to focus on specific public policies when developing recommendations, the achievement of welfare objectives might depend more on the quality of policies than their content. This paper develops several measures of the qualities of policies across countries, arguing that the quality of public policies depends on each politys ability to strike intertemporal transactions necessary to develop and sustain effective policies. The analytical framework developed here indicates that this ability depends on several characteristics of political institutions, such as congressional capabilities, judicial independence, and bureaucratic independence and professionalism. The empirical evidence presented supports this idea. The measures of policy quality developed here could be utilized for other purposes, including the determination of conditions under which more public spending in a given area is likely to generate the desired outcomes.

Keywords: WP-676 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 D78 H10 H50 O10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009-04
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://publications.iadb.org/publications/english ... lity-of-Policies.pdf (application/pdf)

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:idb:brikps:1647

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IDB Publications (Working Papers) from Inter-American Development Bank Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Felipe Herrera Library (bid-library@iadb.org).