We start out from the hypothesis that limited government leads to low uncertainty and low transaction costs. If political institutions affect the degree of uncertainty and transaction costs, we formally show they should affect the steady state level of income per capita. The impact of uncertainty and transaction costs on income per capita is formalized in a simple capital market model with credit constraints. Empirically, we find increases in political constraints precede economic growth, which is in line with the idea that economic development is driven by political development. Furthermore, only when there are high political constraints is polity persistence positively related to income per capita. We interpret these findings in the sense that limited government is the path towards economic development, being a pre-condition for poor countries to converge towards rich countries.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
file. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Find related papers by JEL classification: E22 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Macroeconomics: Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment - - - Capital; Investment; Capacity G11 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Portfolio Choice; Investment Decisions O16 - Economic Development, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - Financial Markets; Saving and Capital Investment P16 - Economic Systems - - Capitalist Systems - - - Political Economy of Capitalism
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
RAFAEL LaPORTA & FLORENCIO LOPEZ-de-SILANES & ANDREI SHLEIFER & ROBERT W. VISHNY, .
"Legal Determinants of External Finance,","
CRSP working papers
324, Center for Research in Security Prices, Graduate School of Business, University of Chicago.
La Porta, Rafael & Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes & Andrei Shleifer & Robert W. Vishny, 1997.
" Legal Determinants of External Finance,"
Journal of Finance,
American Finance Association, vol. 52(3), pages 1131-50, July.
[Downloadable!] (restricted)
Did you know? Citation analysis on IDEAS includes online papers that are freely accessible and whose text could be automatically analyzed, currently about 150000 papers.