Institutions and the Relation between Corruption and Economic Growth

We study the effects of bureaucratic corruption on economic growth in a framework that takes into account that corruption also affects growth through its impact on institutions. We use a formal growth framework in which corruption affects growth negatively because of individual rent‐seeking and stealing of public goods, but where corruption may serve a positive role by taking over the role of institutions. We find that the overall effect of corruption on economic growth is highly dependent on the institutional setting of a country. Particularly in situations where institutions are not well developed corruption may be conducive to economic growth. We also find that the interaction among institutions themselves matters. This underscores the importance of taking into account the complete institutional setting when studying corruption, both in theory as well as empirically.     

Do island states have better institutions?

Since the end of World War II, the number of countries in the world has increased dramatically. Many of these newly independent countries are small both in terms of population and geography, and several are islands. The purpose of this paper is to explore the effects of island status and country size on institutional quality, and to determine if these institutional effects can explain the relatively strong economic performance of islands and small countries. I distinguish between political institutions (Democracy) and economic institutions (Rule of Law). One of the main findings of this paper is that the relationship between island status and institutional quality is significantly positive, and that these results are robust to the inclusion of a number of control variables. Further, I find that country size is negatively related to institutional quality, which is in keeping with previous results. These results provide further support for the hypothesis that institutions account for these countries’ relatively better economic performance.     

Decentralization,social capital,and regional growth: The case of the Italian North-South divide

This paper aims to show how a region's constant level of social capital may have a very different impact on its economic growth depending on whether the central or the local level of government is responsible for regional policy.Our case study is the economic performance of Northern and Southern Italy in the post-World War II period, when a long phase of regional convergence came to a sudden halt in the early 1970s. We focus on the economic effects of the 1970s institutional reforms on government decentralization and wage bargaining. Our main hypothesis is that decentralization allocates the provision of public capital to institutions, the local ones, more exposed to a territory's social capital. Since social capital is lower in the Southern regions, decentralization made their developmental policies less effective from 1970 onwards, and regional inequality increased.We build an endogenous growth model augmented to include the interaction between social capital and public investment as well as the reform of the Italian labour market. We calibrate our model using data of the Italian regions for 1951–71. Our quantitative results indicate that decentralization triggered the influence of local social capital on growth and played a central role in halting the convergence path of the low-social-capital regions.     

制度改进的基本思维:演化动力和优化原则

新古典主义主要基于力量博弈解释制度变迁,但实际上促进制度变迁的因素有三类:一是社会力量结构的自发变动,二是社会力量结构的自觉变动,三是对制度本质的社会认知提高。其中,后两者都与认知有关,认知在非正式制度转化为正式制度中扮演着重要角色。同时,新古典主义主要基于效率原则设计社会制度,但实际上制度优化有两大原则:正义原则和效率原则。其中,正义原则是根本性的,制度的设立和完善必须体现不断深化的社会正义和应得权利。     

EU membership,institutions and growth: The case of Turkey

This paper investigates the institutions-growth relationship during the EU membership process in Turkey. The membership process is considered as a supranational anchor to further improving institutional quality. I examine effects of individual components of institutions on economic growth. I find significant evidence that institutions matter for growth. Specifically, law and order and bureaucratic quality and management of internal conflict and ethnic tensions affect growth in Turkey.     

经济自由及其变动的增长效应——来自跨国经济增长面板数据的再检视

经济自由是市场经济的基础，是社会基础设施（Social Infrastructure）的核心内涵。经济自由的提升有利于提高存量资本的生产配置效率，并对国内外投资给出积极信号，推动经济增长。本文在新古典经济增长理论框架下，研究各国社会基础设施发展水平的不同及其转型动态，用近百个国家的增长面板数据验证经济自由水平及其提升的增长效应。此外，本文还用动态面板数据的GMM估计方法检验发现，经济自由是经济增长的Granger原因，而后者不是前者的Granger原因。该结论对发展中国家的经济发展政策具有指导意义。     

Endogenous Selection of Institutions and Their Exogenous Effects

Institutions shape social outcomes, yet institutions themselves are products of political choices. When institutional choices are determined by the same political and social processes that they shape, institutions are endogenously selected. Here I address the question of whether this endogenous institutional selection necessarily implies endogenous institutional effects. If it does, the use of institutional parameters as independent variables explaining policy outcomes and properties of the resulting political regimes, widespread in the literature on comparative political institutions, is hard to justify. I argue, however, that strategic choice of the rules of the game implies designers' ability to obtain their preferred institutional effects only under conditions of complete information. Under incomplete information, ex-post institutional effects do not need to be endogenous, since at the time of designing the rules the designers were not in position to control the selection of these effects. The reason why the choice of the rules does not imply the choice of their effects lies in the intervening and interactive (rather than additive) role played by the environmental parameters, including players' own characteristics, that are not revealed at the time of the institutional choice. Additionally to the model which illustrates the logic of the argument and the workings of intervening structural effects, I find supporting evidence in the processes of design of election laws in post-communist Europe, where stages of design and implementation followed each other in a very quick succession yet were characterized by substantial changes in manifested institutional preferences of the key political players.     

制度变迁、金融结构与经济增长--基于中国的实证研究

本文采用理论分析与实证分析相结合的研究方法,从理论上分析了制度变迁、金融结构调整与经济增长三者之间的相互作用机理;从实证上通过在金融结构与经济增长模型中引入能够综合反映制度变迁的制度变量,验证了国家制度变迁对一国金融结构与经济增长会起到促进或制约的作用.当制度供给与金融结构和经济增长对制度的需求达到均衡时,国家制度安排会优化金融结构、促进经济增长,否则便会出现规模与效率的"反比"现象,从而回答了转型国家规模与效率的悖论问题,进而给出了我国金融结构升级的选择路径及相关政策建议.     

Social Capital Accumulation and the Exercise of Power: The Case of P2 in Italy

This article addresses the production of legitimate forms of power in our democracies by framing the rise and fall of “Propaganda 2” (P2) — a masonic lodge active in Italy during the 1970s — in the analysis of social capital proposed by Pierre Bourdieu. This lens emphasizes the role played by networks in the accumulation of symbolic capital and their interaction with the historical and institutional context in the exercise of symbolic violence. The experience of P2 is then analyzed to describe, on one hand, the characteristics of the networks that are critical to its success and, on the other, the lodge’s capacity to interfere with the economic and political systems within the context of the Cold War in Italy. The willingness to control and provoke institutional change expressed by P2’s affiliates also shows to what extent the accumulation of social capital, in combination with other forms of capital, may represent a threat to public welfare. By illustrating the interaction between networks and the normative framework underlying our institutions, this case study suggests that the experience of P2 is not an exception in the functioning of our democracies.     

What drives inequality and poverty in the EU? Exploring the impact of macroeconomic and institutional factors

Employing panel data techniques, we investigate the macroeconomic and institutional determinants of inequality and poverty in the EU over the period 1994–2008. We pay particular attention to the effects of macroeconomic environment, social protection and labour market institutions. The empirical analysis shows that the social transfers in cash, and principally the transfers that do not include pensions, exert a prominent impact on inequality and poverty. Also significant is the effect of the GDP per capita. The impact of employment on inequality and poverty is not empirically sound. The same holds for the labour market institutions; an exception is the union density, which appears conducive to a less dispersed personal income distribution. Importantly, the results support the view that the social protection system acts as a catalyst in determining the effectiveness of social spending and the distributive role of economic growth and employment.     

The macroeconomy and microfinance outreach: a panel data analysis

This study examines the effects of macroeconomic and institutional factors on microfinance institution (MFI) outreach. To capture the performance of the macroeconomy, we include proxies for institutional quality, economic growth, FDI inflow, unemployment rate, inflation and the prevalence of wage-earning jobs. Further, we examine effects on outreach along the dimensions of outreach depth and outreach breadth. Using data on 1526 MFIs from 99 countries over the period 2000 to 2015, our results suggest that environments characterised by high levels of economic performance and good institutions tend to hinder outreach performance. These results suggest that MFIs depend on a poor economy to thrive given the informal nature of microfinance.     

Entrepreneurship,trust and corruption

I propose a theoretical model where trust towards strangers is a channel through which institutions determine economic outcomes, in particular, entrepreneurship and corruption. More importantly, I show that the role of trust has been overlooked since high levels of trust do not always enhance desirable economic outcomes. Trust helps individuals to participate in economic exchanges aligned with social welfare, but it also facilitates individuals to cooperate for the achievement of corrupt deals. Under this more general view of trust, the model generates a non-trivial new prediction at the individual level. Specifically, the individual-level relationship between honesty and trust changes depending on the institutional quality of a country. Dishonest individuals are the more trusting individuals in countries with poor institutions, and the less trusting in countries with good institutions. Using individual-level data of 80 countries from the World Value Survey and the European Values Study, I present empirical evidence in support of this prediction.     

Environment, human development and economic growth

Over the last few years, environmental issues have entered into policy design, particularly development and growth policies. Natural resources are considered necessary production inputs and environmental quality is considered a welfare determinant. The integration of environmental issues into economic growth and development theories and empirics is currently widely analyzed in the literature. The effects of natural resources endowment on economic growth are mainly analyzed through the so-called Resource Curse Hypothesis (RCH) whereas the effects of economic growth on environmental quality are part of the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC). Furthermore, recent contributions on RCH and EKC have shown the important role of institutions and human development dimensions in building a sustainable development path. In this paper, we attempt to analyze the causal relationships between economic growth, human development and sustainability combining the RCH and EKC models and adopting a human development perspective. Results confirm the importance of high institutional quality and investments for human capital accumulation in order to build a sustainable development path.     

Institutional framework and economic development: international evidence

This paper examines the effect of ‘quality’ of the institutional framework on economic development. Our empirical results support the hypothesis that ‘good’ institutions improve efficiency and accelerate growth. The positive effect of institutional ‘quality’ is more pronounced with mutually reinforcing support of economic freedom. Our results also indicate that ‘good’ institutions help developing countries grow faster to achieve conditional convergence. We infer from the results that economic development requires not only physical and human capital formation, but also freedom to choose and institutional support.     

Factors of production,productivity, institutions,and development: Evidence from Brazil

The economic growth and development literature emphasizes that investment in technology and physical and human capital is essential for achieving higher levels of development. Political and economic institutions are also relevant in this process. With a sample of 5,503 Brazilian municipalities, this study carries out a development accounting exercise and measures the effects of institutional quality on per capita gross domestic product (GDP), physical capital intensity, human capital stock, and productivity. The empirical results indicate that institutional quality affects GDP per capita mainly through human capital accumulation and total factor productivity.     

Engines of Growth in China: The Limits of Informal Institutions

Abstract:

Since the 1978 reforms, China has experienced rapid economic and social development. GDP growth has been in the double digits on average yearly, creating the fastest sustained economic growth recorded by a major economy in history. Not only did this transform the economy and society at large, China reached important milestones in terms of reducing poverty and creating prosperity in a short period of time. This article uses the conceptual framework of new institutional economics to examine China’s economic growth and how growth has been achieved largely by ‘informal institutions’ that are grounded in culture, customs, and private interactions that emerge spontaneously. The trajectory by which these informal institutions left their imprint on China’s complex economic landscape and how they can constrain future economic growth are also of central importance. After examining decentralization and risk management practices, property rights, and the legal system, we emphasize the importance of creating formal institutions necessary for long-term growth, most importantly innovation. Preliminary evidence shows total factor productivity is tapering off which may reflect the constraints of China’s institutional environment. This ought to be reversed if China is to enjoy long-term sustained growth.     

Is Tinkering with Institutional Quality a Panacea for Firm Performance? Insights from a Semiparametric Approach to Modeling Firm Performance

There is a large and growing literature on the impact of institutional quality on economic performance and the broad consensus is that “good” institutions facilitate better economic performance. The literature that provides micro‐level support for the policy discourse about institutional quality does not, however, account for significant intra‐country variation in reactions of firms to changes in business environments, even within the same industry, and it generally ignores the possibility that the impact of institutional quality on firm performance may not be neutral. In this paper, we analyze the impact of institutions on firm performance using an approach that enables us to overcome these problems with the stylized approach. Using cross‐country firm‐level data, we demonstrate that not only does the marginal impact of institutional quality vary significantly within countries, but also that the impact is economically significant only at the two extremes of the distribution. We view this as prima facie evidence that policies that tinker with institutional quality on the basis of the popular wisdom about the impact of these institutions on the average firm may not have the desired or expected impact, at least at the micro level.     

IMPACT OF JOINING THE WTO ON CHINA's ECONOMIC, LEGAL AND POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS

Abstract.  This essay applies a historical–institutional approach to assess the impact of WTO membership on China's economic, legal and political institutions. In each case historical and institutional trends are described, and the effects of WTO membership on these trends are examined. The topics include changes in economic structure and the rate of growth of GDP, formal legal institutions and the legal behavior of the Chinese people, and the forces contributing to the development of democratic political institutions in China.     

新科技革命对我国经济体制改革的新要求

新科技革命是技术创新成果积累和制度变革相互作用的产物。新科技革命带来的社会生产力飞跃性发展,必然对生产关系和上层建筑产生深刻影响,对我国经济体制改革提出新的历史要求。我国迎接新科技革命的挑战,必须深化改革,为先进生产力快速成长创造良好的制度条件。     

道德和经济利益：双重约束下的农户质量控制行为研究

社会转型是一场复杂的制度变迁过程。经济制度转变包括正式制度约束和非正式制度约束的改变。新制度经济学认为,正式制度约束在制度形成和制度变迁中固然起主导作用,但道德文化、社会习俗等非正式制度约束在制度演进中的巨大影响亦不容忽视。本文主要从制度变迁角度阐述农户对道德与经济利益取舍时关于农产品质量控制行为的内在机理和互动关系,本文强调要大力发展和引入农民合作经济组织,依靠农户间互相监督作用;其次,要加强诚信道德体系建设和诚信道德教育;同时,还要建立和完善以农户为主体的农产品质量追溯体系;最后,需要加强对农产品销售中介组织的监管力度,以减少因中间流通环节的不道德行为而产生的农产品质量控制问题。