Political-Econometrics: The Quantitative Investigation of a Political Economy

In an earlier work [Zusman and Rausser (1990a)], we expounded a descriptive integrated theory of a political-economy. As is generally the case, the motivations for developing the theory were: (a) to provide a general explanation of the working of a political-economy and (b) to provide a mechanism for predicting the values assumed by the endogenous economic variables and the policy instruments for given environments. The two objectives are, in fact, related in several ways. Evidently, explication and prediction alike must derive from a valid theory. As an introduction to the rest of this paper, we now consider the theory validation problem and the role of theory in prediction as applied to our political-economic theory.