Do Business-Friendly Reforms Boost GDP?

Tamanna Adhikari and Karl Whelan ()

No 201930, Working Papers from School of Economics, University College Dublin

Abstract: We use the time series variation in the World Bank’s “distance to frontier” estimates of the ease of doing business to assess the effects of changes in this variable on real GDP per capita. The use of Vector Autoregression techniques allows us to identify shocks to the ease of doing business that are initially uncorrelated with GDP, thus addressing an important endogeneity problem that affects the cross-sectional literature on this topic. The results are surprising. We report a robust finding that improvements to the ease of doing business have at least a temporary negative impact on GDP and find little evidence for a positive effect in the years following these improvements.

Keywords: Economic growth; Business environment; Doing business (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O43 O47 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 37 pages
Date: 2019-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mac
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10197/11268 First version, 2019 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Do Business-Friendly Reforms Boost GDP? (2021)
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:ucn:wpaper:201930

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from School of Economics, University College Dublin Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Nicolas Clifton ().