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Recent years have seen a significant focus in the literature on growth and development on the idea that legal and political institutions are the key determinant of economic development. The main finding of this paper is that the focus on the primacy of legal and political institutions may be misplaced and that business-friendly economic policies (proxied for here by the World Bank's Doing Business indicator) are the key determinant of the level of income per capita. We find that a country's Doing Business rank dominates a range of measures of legal and political institutional quality as an explanatory variable for income per capita. We also find the Doing Business rank to be a key explanatory variable for economic growth and that previous findings assigning a significant role to educational attainment are not robust to the inclusion of this new indicator in growth regressions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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In this paper we show that the existing low estimates of the cost of protection have failed to consider altogether or inappropriately the effects on the cost of protection of economic growth and the historic expansion of world trade at a rate greater than real output. We argue that if such growth is incorporated into models of the cost of protection, the net present value of costs readily becomes very large. The paper follows the basic approach used by M. Feldstein [1979], who showed that in a growing world the welfare cost of any steady rate of inflation approaches infinity as long as the rate of economic growth exceeds the discount rate.
We review the traditional estimates of the cost of protection. They are shown to provide extremely low estimates in a static analytical framework. We then argue that the cost of protection grows at the rate at which international trade expands because it prevents exploitation of the opportunity for gains from trade growing at that rate. In the post-war years trade has grown much more rapidly than real output. The growth-rate is also much greater than any of the commonly used rates of social discount. It therefore follows that the present value of the cost of protection is very large. Precise estimates depend on the length of protection and the size of any social benefits it provides. While no empirical estimates are presented, the analytical approach suggests a way for resolving what many economists perceive to be the puzzle of existing estimates of extremely low costs of protection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Kyklos is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)