The Role of the State in Economic Development

This paper discusses the recent literature on the role of the state in economic development. It concludes that government incentives to enact sound policies are key to economic success. It also discusses the evidence on what happens after episodes of economic and political liberalizations, asking whether political liberalizations strengthen government incentives to enact sound economic policies. The answer is mixed. Most episodes of economic liberalizations are indeed preceded by political liberalizations. But the countries that have done better are those that have managed to open up the economy first, and only later have liberalized their political system.political liberalization, democracy, economic development

Why do Politicians Delegate?

Opportunistic politicians maximize the probability of reelection and rents from office holding. Can it be optimal from their point of view to delegate policy choices to independent bureaucracies? The answer is yes: politicians will delegate some policy tasks, though in general not those that would be socially optimal to delegate. In particular, politicians tend not to delegate coalition forming redistributive policies and policies that create large rents or effective campaign contributions. Instead they prefer to delegate risky policies to shift risk (and blame) on bureaucracies.

External Debt and Political Instability

This paper studies theoretically and empirically the role of domestic political incentives in the accumulation of large external debts by developing countries during 1972-81. The theoretical model characterizes two equilibrium regimes. In one regime the borrower is on its demand curve and changes in the loan size demand are accommodated by the lenders. In the other regime the borrower is credit rationed, and the loan size is determined by the perceived country risk. Higher political instability increases the equilibrium loan size in the first regime and decreases it in the second. Using out-of-sample of evidence, we identify the two regimes in the data. We then find that in the unconstrained regime political instability has a significant positive effect on the loan size, whereas it has no significant effect in the credit rationing regime. Hence the evidence indicates a positive effect of political instability on the demand for sovereign loans, as predicted by the theory.

Political Economics and Public Finance

Observed fiscal policy varies greatly across time and countries. How can we explain this variation across time and countries? This paper surveys the recent literature that has tried to answer this question. We adopt a unified approach in portraying public policy as the equilibrium outcome of an explicitly specified political process. We divide the material into three parts. In Part I, we focus on median-voter equilibria that apply to policy issues where disagreement between voters is likely to be one-dimensional. We thus study the general redistributive programs which are typical of the modern welfare state: redistribution between rich and poor, young and old, employed and unemployed, resident of different regions, and labor and capital. In Part II we study special interest politics. Here the policy problem is multi-dimensional and we focus on specific political mechanisms: we study legislative bargaining, lobbying, and electoral competition, as well as the possible interactions between these different forms of political activity. Finally, Part III deals with a set of questions that can be brought under the label of comparative politics. Here we deal with policy choice under alternative political constitutions; we model the rationale for separation of powers and contrast the stylized features of congressional and parliamentary political systems, focusing on their implications for rent extraction by politicians, redistribution and public goods provision.

The political economy of fiscal policy and inflation in developing countries : an empirical analysis

Most economists treat fiscal policy as exogenous and consider policymakers as machines to be programmed. Rarely do they seek to determine why, for instance, some countries rely on the inflation tax while others use direct taxation, let alone what political factors affect such decisions. Yet without a theory of how fiscal policymakers behave, at both the revenue and the expenditure levels, there is no guarantee that policy advice will turn out to be sound. The authors present the results of an empirical analysis of the political economy of fiscal policy for a group of developing countries. They look at alternative ways of incorporating political variables into the explanation of government policy actions. Dividing their results into three sections, one each for inflation, budget deficits, and devaluations, they find that: (a) the equilibrium inflation rate is higher the more citizens disagree about which party should hold office, and the more unlikely it is that the government currently in office will be reappointed; (b) political instability and polarization lead to a collective myopia that sometimes tempts policymakers to borrow too heavily and to leave the bills to their successors; and (c) governments tend to implement adjustment policies early in their tenure when they command political authority, but if political conflict arises, they may lack the strength to change the macroeconomic status quo and will resort instead to inflation and deficits.Economic Theory&Research,Economic Stabilization,Public Sector Economics&Finance,Environmental Economics&Policies,National Governance

The Growth Effect of Democracy: Is it Heterogenous and how can it be Estimated?

We estimate the effect of political regime transitions on growth with semi-parametric methods, combining difference in differences with matching, that have not been used in macroeconomic settings. Our semi-parametric estimates suggest that previous parametric estimates may have seriously underestimated the growth effects of democracy. In particular, we find an average negative effect on growth of leaving democracy on the order of −2 percentage points implying effects on income per capita as large as 45 percent over the 1960-2000 panel. Heterogenous characteristics of reforming and non-reforming countries appear to play an important role in driving these results.growth, democracy, development, political institutions

Moderating Political Extremism: Single Round vs Runoff Elections under Plurality Rule

We compare single ballot vs dual ballot elections under plurality rule, assuming sincere voting and allowing for partly endogenous party formation. Under the dual ballot, the number of parties is larger but the influence of extremists voters on equilibrium policy is smaller, because their bargaining power is reduced compared to a single ballot election. The predictions on the number of parties and on policy volatility are consistent with data on municipal elections in Italy, where cities with more (less) than 15,000 inhabitants have dual (single) ballots respectively.political extremism