Thank you for this comment—I think one advantage of the Acemoglu et. al. (2019) paper published in the Journal of Political Economy (https://economics.mit.edu/files/16686) is that it accounts for the economic crises that generally precede transitions to democracy—democracies initially grow slowly as they emerge out of depressions, and then grow faster as they invest in capital, education and health. One reason existing studies had found mixed effects is that they hadn’t properly accounted for these dynamics. I think there are also strong second-order effects on global growth of democracy because democracies impose lower tariffs on other countries—especially on other democracies—and democracies rarely if ever fight each other. Peace and trade are likely to enhance global growth—though these externalities may be difficult to properly measure.
I haven’t read any of the papers cited here, nor am I especially well-versed in relevant areas of economics. But my initial reaction to “Most of the biggest growth accelerations have occurred in autocracies” is that that sounds like a correlation that’s relatively unlikely to be explained by autocracy causing more growth, and relatively unlikely to conflict with the idea that democracy causes better growth (with all other factors held constant).
In particular, I’ve heard it argued that “catch-up” growth is substantially easier than “cutting-edge” growth. If that’s true, then that might suggest autocracies might have experienced growth accelerations more often than democracies not because being an autocracy causes a higher chance of having a growth acceleration, but rather because:
it happens to be that autocracies have less often been on the “cutting edge” than democracies, so they’ve more often been able to engage in “catch-up” growth
on top of that, being an autocracy makes it more likely that a country will have deceleration episodes, which then creates additional opportunities for “catch-up” growth
A related or perhaps identical possibility is that autocracies may sometimes implement policies that actively harm their economies in major ways, such that merely removing those policies could cause rapid growth. (I have in mind the transition from Mao’s policies to Deng Xiaoping’s policies, though I don’t know much about that transition, really.)
This is all rather speculative. I’d be interested to hear thoughts on this from someone with more knowledge of the area.
Thank you for this comment—I think one advantage of the Acemoglu et. al. (2019) paper published in the Journal of Political Economy (https://economics.mit.edu/files/16686) is that it accounts for the economic crises that generally precede transitions to democracy—democracies initially grow slowly as they emerge out of depressions, and then grow faster as they invest in capital, education and health. One reason existing studies had found mixed effects is that they hadn’t properly accounted for these dynamics. I think there are also strong second-order effects on global growth of democracy because democracies impose lower tariffs on other countries—especially on other democracies—and democracies rarely if ever fight each other. Peace and trade are likely to enhance global growth—though these externalities may be difficult to properly measure.
I haven’t read any of the papers cited here, nor am I especially well-versed in relevant areas of economics. But my initial reaction to “Most of the biggest growth accelerations have occurred in autocracies” is that that sounds like a correlation that’s relatively unlikely to be explained by autocracy causing more growth, and relatively unlikely to conflict with the idea that democracy causes better growth (with all other factors held constant).
In particular, I’ve heard it argued that “catch-up” growth is substantially easier than “cutting-edge” growth. If that’s true, then that might suggest autocracies might have experienced growth accelerations more often than democracies not because being an autocracy causes a higher chance of having a growth acceleration, but rather because:
it happens to be that autocracies have less often been on the “cutting edge” than democracies, so they’ve more often been able to engage in “catch-up” growth
on top of that, being an autocracy makes it more likely that a country will have deceleration episodes, which then creates additional opportunities for “catch-up” growth
A related or perhaps identical possibility is that autocracies may sometimes implement policies that actively harm their economies in major ways, such that merely removing those policies could cause rapid growth. (I have in mind the transition from Mao’s policies to Deng Xiaoping’s policies, though I don’t know much about that transition, really.)
This is all rather speculative. I’d be interested to hear thoughts on this from someone with more knowledge of the area.