Inequality and the Instability of Polity and Policy
Abstract
We create alternative measures of political instability, which capture only movements from dictatorship to democracy and vice versa and, unlike older, well-known measures, does not capture government changes that preserve the democratic or dictatorial structure of the country. We show that inequality is positively correlated with our measures of political instability as well as with a well-known measure (used by Alesina and Perotti) but the impact of inequality on the latter is only through components of political instability captured by our measures. We show that our measures have significant policy implications - political instability increases both fiscal and trade polity volatility. Copyright (C) The Author(s). Journal compilation (C) Royal Economic Society 2008.Download Info
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Bibliographic Info
Article provided by Royal Economic Society in its journal The Economic Journal.
Volume (Year): 118 (2008)
Issue (Month): 531 (08)
Pages: 1285-1314
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Web page: http://www.res.org.uk/
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Citations
Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.Cited by:
- Vatcharin Sirimaneetham, 2006. "Explaining policy volatility in developing countries," Bristol Economics Discussion Papers 06/583, Department of Economics, University of Bristol, UK.
- Fatás, Antonio & Mihov, Ilian, 2005. "Policy Volatility, Institutions and Economic Growth," CEPR Discussion Papers 5388, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
- Bittencourt, Manoel, 2010. "Democracy, Populism and Hyperinflation[s]: Evidence from Latin America," Proceedings of the German Development Economics Conference, Hannover 2010 47, Verein für Socialpolitik, Research Committee Development Economics.
- Klomp, Jeroen & de Haan, Jakob, 2009. "Political institutions and economic volatility," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 25(3), pages 311-326, September.
- Lucifora, Claudio & Moriconi, Simone, 2012. "Political Instability and Labor Market Institutions," IZA Discussion Papers 6457, Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA).
- James Fenske, 2012.
"African Polygamy: Past and Present,"
Economics Series Working Papers
WPS/2012-20, University of Oxford, Department of Economics.
- Fenske, James, 2012. "African polygamy: Past and present," MPRA Paper 41618, University Library of Munich, Germany.
- James Fenske, 2012. "African polygamy: Past and present," CSAE Working Paper Series 2012-20, Centre for the Study of African Economies, University of Oxford.
- Roe, Mark J. & Siegel, Jordan I., 2011. "Political instability: Effects on financial development, roots in the severity of economic inequality," Journal of Comparative Economics, Elsevier, vol. 39(3), pages 279-309, September.
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