How Does Democracy fare with Economic Welfare for a Trading Nation?

Dawood Mamoon

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: The paper examines how political institutions in comparison to legal, social and economic institutions fare with different measures of inequality in a cross section framework. The empirical analysis suggests that countries which practice democracy are less prone to unequal outcomes especially when it comes to wage inequality and income inequality whereas autocracy is associated with higher level of wage inequalities but its impact on income inequalities are insignificant. Though under good economic management, even autocracies may redistribute incomes from the richest to the poorest, more generally an autocratic set up violates the median voter hypothesis. The results also show that political stability is more sensitive to inequalities than democracy and autocracy which is to say that the countries which are internally politically stable also form more equal societies.

Keywords: Institutions; Trade Liberalisation; Redistribution; Wage Inequality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F15 O1 P3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/10433/1/MPRA_paper_10433.pdf original version (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:pra:mprapa:10433

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().