Growth and Poverty Reduction Does Political Regime Matter?

This essay explores the relationship between political regime and critical economic outcomes such as economic growth and poverty reduction. The organization of the paper is as follows. Section 2 makes a brief review of the economic performance of developing Asian economies over the last four decades. As these economies have varied significantly in terms of economic outcomes as well as their political complexions, a simple juxtaposition of the two would suggest a link between political regimes and economic outcomes. Given this apparent association between political regimes and economic outcomes, this section argues that the superior economic performance (in terms of economic growth and poverty reduction) of the authoritarian or semi-authoritarian East Asian economies, compared to their democratic counterparts, can be attributed to their underlying differences in the process of policy making, in the nature of the bureaucracy, and in the type of economic governance. Sections 3 through 5 provide further elaboration on this. The paper ends in Section 6, which offers some concluding remarks.