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This paper examines the impact of hegemonic governance on economic development, measured in terms of gross national income (GNI) per capita and exports as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP). Specifically, we test two sets of competing hypotheses drawn from neo-liberal institutionalist ?Washington Consensus? and world systems scholarship to address the question: does hegemonic power increase ? or decrease ? economic development? We utilize King?s Amelia software to address the grievous missing data issues in the World Bank?s World Development Indicators 2002 data collection. We also use comprehensive, multidimensional indicators (from Sacko 2003) to conduct a cross-national, cross-time, empirical investigation of the effects of hegemonic power of the United States (1960-1992) on economic development in five (5) regions: Latin America, Europe and Central Asia, the Middle East and North Africa, South Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa. We find that for the Latin American region, hegemonic power has a statistically significant negative effect on GNI per capita across all of our model specifications. Hegemonic power, however, has no statistically significant effect on GNI per capita in the Middle East and North Africa region, the South Asia region, or the sub-Saharan Africa region. For the Latin American region, hegemonic power also has a statistically significant negative effect on exports as a percentage of GDP. In contrast, hegemonic power has a statistically significant positive effect on exports as a percentage of GDP in the Middle East and North Africa region and the sub-Saharan Africa region. Thus, while, in Latin America, we find some support for Wallerstein?s world systems theory and the work of scholars focused on the deleterious effects of hegemony (neo-imperialism), we also find support for the neo-liberal institutionalist / Washington Consensus hypothesis that hegemony can serve to augment economic development ? at least in the Middle East and North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Researchers have frequently studied the effect of democracy on economic and social development and, for the most part, have only found indirect and relatively weak positive effects between the two indicators. Yet, many studies fall short in highlighting t ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]