Democracy & Growth

Robert Barro

No 4909, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

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 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, life expectancy, and education - substantially raise the probability that political freedoms will grow. These results allow for predictions about which countries will become more or less democratic in the future.

Date: 1994-10
Note: EFG
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (56)

Published as Barro, Robert J. "Democracy And Growth," Journal of Economic Growth, 1996, v1(1,Mar), 1-27.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w4909.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:nbr:nberwo:4909

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w4909

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by (wpc@nber.org).