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This paper argues that democracy enhances technological change, the most important determinant of long-term economic growth. It first presents an argument on how and why dictators restrict civil liberties and diffusion of information to survive in office, even if this reduces their personal consumption. The argument predicts that autocracies have slower technological change than democracies, which in turn impairs GDP per capita growth rates. These and other implications from the argument are tested empirically, and so are implications from alternative explanations on the association between democracy and technological change. Drawing on an extensive global dataset, with some time series going back to the early 19th century, the paper reports robust evidence that democracy increases not only technology-induced growth but also net economic growth rates. Notably, the results hold when accounting for the endogeneity of democracy, country-fixed effects, and sample-selection bias. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the incidence of education on the determination of personal income has been well documented by scholars, the same is not true when it comes to the effects of education on economic growth, where different data sets and models have yielded contradictory results. This paper shows that a democratic environment is favourable to the impact of education on economic growth, even if democracy itself may not have a direct effect. This can be at least part of the explanation for why education alone, when observed in a cross section of countries, has shown mixed effects on growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: We explore whether EU membership has led to faster economic growth. Using different estimation strategies, different time periods, different country samples, and different datasets, we are unable to demonstrate the presence of a membership growth premium. This may reflect that GDP data are too noisy and/or causal identification too complicated, in which case we should remain agnostic about the EU's growth impact. Alternatively, it may reflect that EU membership simply has no effect on economic growth. Either way, these findings urge strong caution about one of EU membership's key alleged benefits: greater economic prosperity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Bringing together the classic defense of liberty and democracy, the political economy of hierarchy, endogenous growth theory, and the new institutional economics on growth, we propose a new institutional theory that identifies democracy's unique advantage in prompting economic growth. We contend that the channel of liberty‐to‐innovation is the most critical channel in which democracy holds a unique advantage over autocracy in promoting growth, especially during the stage of growth via innovation. Our theory thus predicts that democracy holds a positive but indirect effect upon growth via the channel of liberty‐to‐innovation, conditioned by the level of economic development. We then present quantitative evidence for our theory. To our best knowledge, we are the first to propose such an indirect and conditional effect of democracy upon economic development and provide systematic evidence. Our study promises to integrate and reconcile many seemingly unrelated and often contradictory theories and evidence regarding regime and growth, including providing a possible explanation for the inconclusive results from regressing overall regime score against the rate of economic growth or change in level of GDP per capita. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the interrelationships between democracy, economic freedoms, and economic growth. We study 24 post-communist economies over the period 1990-2007, and find that strong democratic institutions are associated with greater economic freedoms and larger public sectors and public deficits. Stronger economic freedoms lead to more rapid growth, but large public sectors and public deficits have adverse effects on growth. We identify trade freedom, monetary freedom and freedom from corruption as the most important indicators of economic freedom for growth in transition countries over the period 1994-2007. Some of the factors associated with faster growth prior to the crisis were associated with greater declines in growth during the first years of the financial crisis (2008-2009). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Investigates the impact of direct democracy in Switzerland. Promotion of economic and political prosperity; Decrease of public sector size in classical liberal; Evolution of existing political and legal practices.