 The agricultural and the democratic transitions: causality and the roundup modelErich Gundlach and Martin Paldam No 1521, Kiel Working Papers from Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW Kiel) Abstract: Long-run development (in income) causes a large fall in the share of agriculture commonly known as the agricultural transition. We confirm that this conventional wisdom is strongly supported by the data. Long-run development (in income) also causes a large increase in democracy known as the democratic transition. Elsewhere we have shown that it is almost as strong as the agricultural transition. Recently, a method has been presented to weed out spuriousness. It makes the democratic transition go away by turning income insignificant, when it is supplemented by a set of formal controls. We show that the same method makes the agricultural transition go away as well. Hence, it seems to be a method that kills far too much, as suggested by the subtitle. This suggestion leads to a discussion of the very meaning of long-run causality. Keywords: Long-run growth; transitions; causality and spuriousness (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:ifwkwp:1521 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Kiel Working Papers from Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW Kiel) Contact information at EDIRC. |
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