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While economic policy liberalization is a key to higher overall growth, reforms are often not implemented due to a fierce opposition from politically powerful prospective losers from reforms. In this respect, it is frequently claimed that economic crises can help overcome resistance to policy liberalization. Furthermore, political authorities not constrained by democratic checks and balances are supposed to be more decisive and are thus expected to carry out market-friendly policy change in times of crises more easily. Rules of democratic participation and checks and balances may however also be good for policy reform, as they can serve as an institutional mechanism for peaceful conflict resolution. The paper investigates empirically the interaction between economic growth performance and political institutions in producing free-market reform. We explore whether political regime types shape systematically government policy responses to good or bad growth performance, employing panel econometric techniques and using recently updated data for economic reform and political institutions. Contrary to conventional wisdom we find that a bad growth performance is conducive to reforms in democracies, but not in autocracies. Democracies not only carry out more liberal economic policies in general, but they are also more responsive to economic growth crises. Democratic rule seems to be favorable for policy liberalization, but a very good growth performance weakens liberalization incentives considerably. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Bilateral donors have recognized the need to improve the consistency of donors' policies towards developing countries. However, the impact of policy consistency on economic development has not been documented in the literature to date. Our contribution is twofold: firstly, we use the indices provided by the Center for Global Development (CGD) to construct indicators of overall donors' policies performance and donors' policies consistency at the recipient level. Secondly, we assume that the growth-consistency nexus is dynamic and our results suggest that an increase in consistency by one standard deviation increases growth on average by 1,1 percentage point. This result holds for different instrumentation strategies and robustness checks. We also highlight that the overall policy performance (OPP) increases growth above a sufficient level of donors' policies diversification and level of OPP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

SUMMARY As a result of inadequacies in the traditional approach to location problems a new body of thought has emerged in recent years which centers on the notion of development poles (po̧les de croissance). This concept was first put forth systematically by F. PERROUX, though it now has come into use in many countries in both theoretical discussions and public policy programs.-The present article examines the often ambiguous uses which have been made of development pole theory and evaluates some of its principal strengths and weaknesses as a tool of economic analysis. Attention also is given to the related concepts of economic space and economic domination. Among the problems of development pole theory are its emphasis upon big industrial undertakings, its relationship to external economies of agglomeration, its relationship to public policy goals, and its need for semantic clarification. Nevertheless, the theory remains potentially valuable for conditional analysis of the process of regional development; moreover, it may be expected that French regional planning experience will provide data in the near future for refining the approach to rational spatial resource allocation to which French economists have so largely contributed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]