Democracy and Reforms: Evidence from a New Dataset*
Author: Mr. Antonio Spilimbergo, Ms. Paola Giuliano, and Ms. Prachi Mishra

Contributor Notes

Author’s E-Mail Address: paola.giuliano@anderson.ucla.edu; pmishra@imf.org; aspilimbergo@imf.org
Publication Date:
01 Jul 2010
eISBN:
9781455201846
Language:
English
Keywords:
WP; democracy; country; Lagged democracy
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Empirical evidence on the relationship between democracy and economic reforms is limited to few reforms, countries, and years. This paper studies the impact of democracy on the adoption of economic reforms using a new dataset on reforms in the financial, capital and banking sectors, product markets, agriculture, and trade for 150 countries over the period 1960 - 2004. Democracy has a positive and significant impact on the adoption of economic reforms but there is no evidence that economic reforms foster democracy. Our results are robust to the inclusion of a large variety of controls and estimation strategies.

Abstract

Empirical evidence on the relationship between democracy and economic reforms is limited to few reforms, countries, and years. This paper studies the impact of democracy on the adoption of economic reforms using a new dataset on reforms in the financial, capital and banking sectors, product markets, agriculture, and trade for 150 countries over the period 1960 - 2004. Democracy has a positive and significant impact on the adoption of economic reforms but there is no evidence that economic reforms foster democracy. Our results are robust to the inclusion of a large variety of controls and estimation strategies.

I. Introduction

Political and economic freedoms go hand in hand … or do they not? This is one of the oldest questions in economics and in political science, which is still largely unanswered. This paper answers this question using a novel dataset on economic reforms, which is the most exhaustive in the literature in terms of countries, years, and range of reform coverage.

This question is still open because there are very good theoretical arguments and numerous examples as to why political freedom can either hinder or facilitate economic reforms. Take the historical examples of Chile under Pinochet, or South Korea under Park. In both cases, important economic reforms were undertaken under dictatorial regimes. The majority of the contemporary industrialized countries were not democracies when they took off (Schwarz, 1992). In most cases, East Asian economies did develop under undemocratic regimes. In addition to these historical examples from every region of the world and different historical periods, there are compelling theoretical reasons as to why less democratic regimes may favor economic reforms and growth.

A fully democratic regime can fall prey to interest groups, which put their goals before general well being. Sometimes, capitalists entrenched in their rent-seeking positions are the main opponents of economic reforms. In a newly independent country only a ‘benevolent dictator’ can shelter the institutions, avoid that the state becomes captive of any specific interest group, and allow the state to perform its function in an efficient way.1 In particular, interest groups can block reforms if there is uncertainty about the distribution of the benefits (Fernandez and Rodrik, 1991). In addition to pressure from interest groups, democracy can lead to excessive private and public consumption and lack of sufficient investment (Huntington, 1968); so dictatorial regimes can rely on financial repression to increase the domestic saving rate. Wages are typically higher under democracy (Rodrik, 1999). Several countries, including the Soviet Union and many East Asian countries, have been able to increase savings, and ultimately achieve high economic growth rate, thanks to a repressive political system and an attendant highly regulated financial system. In conclusion, do the historical examples and the theoretical arguments provide a compelling case against the role of democracy in fostering economic reforms? The answer to this question is a resounding no.

The alternative view that democracy often accompanies economic reforms is also based on strong theoretical arguments and solid empirical evidence. Secured property rights, as guaranteed by a democracy, are considered key to economic development. In general, dictators cannot credibly make commitments because of time-inconsistency; so no reform can be undertaken (McGuire and Olson, 1996). Autocratic rulers tend to be predatory, disrupting economic activity and making any reform effort meaningless; autocratic regimes have also an interest in postponing reforms and maintaining rent-generating activities for a restricted number of supporting groups. On the opposite, democratic rulers should be more sensitive to the interest of the public, and so more willing to implement reforms, which destroy monopolies in favor of the general interests. In addition to these theoretical arguments, there is strong empirical evidence that reforms are highly correlated with democracy.

The correlation between democracy and economic reforms is very strong both across time and in a cross section. Figure 1 shows the correlation over time between the indices of democracy (measured as polity IV and normalized between 0 and 1) and reform (all the indices are normalized between 0 and 1, with 0 corresponding to the least reformed and 1 to the most reformed) in the following six sectors (or areas)2—(i) domestic financial, (ii) capital account, (iii) product markets (electricity and telecommunications), (iv) agriculture, (v) trade (based on tariffs) and (vi) current account transactions—over time.3 All the cases show a strong correlation between democracy and regulation, with democracy usually preceding the deregulation process. Figure 2 shows that the correlation holds very strongly also when we take a cross section: countries that are more democratic are also more reformed. However, these correlations in themselves do not show that democracy necessarily causes economic reforms. The correlation could run in the opposite direction, or both democracy and economic reforms could be driven by a common third factor.

Figure 1.
Figure 1.

Regulation and Democracy over Time

Citation: IMF Working Papers 2010, 173; 10.5089/9781455201846.001.A001

Notes to Figure 1: This figure shows the correlation over time between the indices of democracy on the y-axis (measured as polity IV and normalized between 0 and 1) and reforms on the x-axis (all the indices are normalized between 0 and 1, with 0 corresponding to the least reformed and 1 to the most reformed) in the following eight sectors (or areas) – (i) domestic financial, (ii) capital account, (iii) product markets (electricity and telecommunications), (iv) agriculture, (v) labor, (vi) trade (based on tariffs) and (vii) current account transactions.
Figure 2.
Figure 2.

Democracy and Reforms, 2000

Citation: IMF Working Papers 2010, 173; 10.5089/9781455201846.001.A001

Notes: This figure shows the correlation in 2000 between the indices of democracy on the y-axis (measured as polity IV and normalized between 0 and 1) and reforms on the x-axis (all the indices are normalized between 0 and 1, with 0 corresponding to the least reformed and 1 to the most reformed) in the following eight sectors (or areas) – (i) domestic financial, (ii) capital account, (iii) product markets (electricity and telecommunications), (iv)agriculture, (v) labor, (vi) trade (based on tariffs) and (vii) current account transactions. The country codes and groups used in this figures are described in Tables A2 and A3.

The sharp contrast between these opposing views has left the question of the effects of democracy on economic reforms largely unanswered. The goal of this paper is to address again this issue using a novel database, which covers almost 150 countries, 6 sectors and spanning more than 40 years of data.

The main findings are that an increase in the quality of democratic institutions is significantly correlated with the adoption of economic reforms but there is no evidence of a feedback effect from economic to political liberalization. These results are robust to controlling for country, reform-specific effects and any possible interaction among them. Global reform waves and possible country-time varying determinants of reforms (including crises, reforms in neighboring countries, existence of compensation for losers, human capital and bureaucratic quality, and several political variables) do not weaken these results, which are also robust to using an instrumental variable strategy.

The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 reviews the existing literature on economic reforms and democracy; Section 3 presents the data; Section 4 presents the results on the effects of democracy on reforms, controlling for other possible determinants of reforms and the possibility of reverse causality and omitted variables; Section 5 concludes.

II. Democracy and Reforms: Theory and Empirics

While there is a vast theoretical and empirical literature that considers the determinants of economic reforms in general, there is scarce evidence, particularly empirical, on the relationship between democracy and reforms.4

Economic theory does not give a clear answer on whether political liberalizations favor or hinder economic reforms or if the relationship could go both ways. Democratic regimes could lead to more reforms if reforms create more winners than losers (Giavazzi and Tabellini, 2005). Democratically elected governments may also have greater legitimacy to implement and sustain policies bearing high short-term costs; similarly institutional changes—e.g., strengthening an independent legal system or a professional civil service required to ensure political freedom and democracy—could lead also to successful market reforms. Finally, democracy could create an environment conducive to economic reforms by limiting rent-seeking and putting in place a system of checks and balances (Dethier, Ghanem and Zoli, 1999).

Alternatively, political liberalization could lead to less economic reforms if the electoral system creates a pivotal voter with veto power. For instance, it has been argued that Chile in the late 70s and the 80s implemented several forward-looking economic reforms because the military regime did not have to respond to a short-sighted electorate. At the same time, it has been argued that Costa Rica has been a laggard in economic reforms because the democratic system gives veto power to groups that can lose from reforms. Democratic legislators are more likely to adopt time-inconsistent policies (Quinn 2000). In fact, uncertainty about the impact of economic reforms at the individual level could also lead a rational electorate to vote against reforms even if they are known ex ante to benefit a majority of them (Fernandez and Rodrik, 1991).

The theoretical predictions about the feedback effect from economic reforms to democratization are ambiguous as well. For example, economic liberalizations could be associated with higher quality of democratic institutions if they increase the power of the middle class (Rajan and Zingales, 2003). On the other hand, liberalization could lower democracy through increases in income inequality and the associated political strife and violence (Quinn, 1997, Dixon and Boswell, 1996).

On the empirical side, only a few empirical papers have looked at the relationship between democracy and reforms. Among the available evidence, Giavazzi and Tabellini (2005) study the feedback effects between economic and political liberalizations. Economic liberalization is defined as the event of becoming open, where openness is defined as in Wacziarg and Welch (2008). Political liberalization is the event of becoming a democracy; where democracy is defined by strictly positive values of polity2. Using a panel of 140 countries over 1960–2000 (with country and year fixed effects), Giavazzi and Tabellini (2005) find evidence of a positive and significant relationship between democratizations and trade reforms; they find that the feedback effect could run in both directions although the causality is more likely to run from political to economic reforms. In comparison, we find little evidence of feedback effects from reforms to democracy.5 Similarly, Persson (2005) shows that the forms of democracy (parliamentary, proportional and permanent ones) are important in explaining variation in trade reforms (measured by the Wacziarg and Welch index) and an index protection of property rights.6 Amin and Djankov (2009) show that democracy (measured by Freedom House or PolityIV scores) is good for micro-reforms (as defined in the World Bank’s Doing Business Database).7 Eichengreen and Leblang (2008) find evidence of a positive two-way relationship between democracy and globalization defined as trade and capital account liberalization.8 They, however, find that these effects are not uniform across time and space.

Quinn (2000) examines the relationship between democracy and international financial liberalization. He measures international financial regulation through changes in current and capital account openness created using the Exchange Arrangements and Exchange Restrictions from the IMF. Democracy is measured by changes in polity2. Quinn uses both panel data techniques and individual country VARs for 40–50 countries over 1950–97 and finds evidence that democracies liberalize international finance, especially capital accounts. Unlike this paper, he also finds evidence of feedback effects from financial liberalization to democratizations whereby capital account liberalization is associated with decreases in democracy 6 to 15 years later.9 Finally, Olper, Falkowski and Swinnen (2009) study the effect of regime transitions from autocracy to democracy on agricultural policy distortions, measured by indicators of government transfers to the agriculture sector. They find that while agriculture protection increases after a country’s transition to democracy, there is no effect when the regime shifts from democracy to autocracy.

Other papers examine the relationship between economic and political liberalizations in the context of post-communist countries. For example, Fidrmuc (2003) in a sample of 25 transition countries over 1990-2000 finds a positive relationship between the indices of liberalization and democracy. Liberalization is measured by an average of various reform indicators developed by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development covering privatization, governance and enterprise restructuring, price liberalization, trade and foreign exchange, competition policy, and banking and securities markets. Democracy is measured by an average of the indicators of political rights and civil liberties reported by the Freedom House. In a similar vein, Dethier, Ghanem, and Zoli (1999) also find that political freedom and civil liberties facilitated economic liberalization in the 25 post-communist countries between 1992 and 1997. Milner and Mukerjee (2009) find evidence that democracy fosters trade and capital account liberalization, but also that the impact of openness of democracy is quite weak in developing countries. Grosjean and Senik (forthcoming) using a survey conducted in 2006 by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the World Bank in 28 post-transition countries find a significant effect of democracy (measured by the Freedom House democracy score) on market liberalization, but no evidence of a feedback effect. In addition to the statistical analysis, some papers (Bates and Krueger, 1993) have focused on case studies. This approach takes into account the complexity and the country specificity of the interaction between democracy and economic reforms.

To summarize, while there are many theoretical predictions about the relationships between political and economic liberalizations, empirical evidence on the subject is limited to reforms in particular sectors, in particular international trade and finance, micro-reforms, or specific countries over a short period.

Our study is the first one to combine a comprehensive coverage of reforms in different sectors, a significant coverage of countries and a long time period. In particular, the dataset used in this paper spans six sectors, and both developing and developed countries from the 1960 up until 2004.

III. Data

A. Data on reforms

Our analysis is based on a completely new and extensive dataset, compiled by the Research Department of the IMF, describing the degree of regulation for a sample of 150 industrial and developing countries. The new dataset thus has significant advantages over existing data sources, which cover a narrower set of reforms and countries. Reform indicators cover six sectors, including both financial and real sectors. Financial sector reform indicators include reforms pertaining to domestic financial markets and the external capital account, while real sector structural reform indicators include measures of product and agriculture markets, trade, and current account reforms. Each indicator contains different sub-indices summarizing different dimensions of the regulatory environment in each sector. The sub-indices are then aggregated into indices and normalized between 0 and 1. We construct all the measures of reform in each sector so that higher values represent greater degrees of liberalization.

Table 1 presents a brief definition and sources of the reform indicators used in this paper. IMF (2008) describes all data sources and full details of the construction of the indicators.

Table 1.

Reform Indicators

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This table presents brief description of the reform indicators used in the paper. For a full description of all variables, data and sources refer to IMF (2008).

a. Financial sector reforms in the domestic financial market

The dataset contains two measures of financial sector reforms, one for the domestic financial sector and the other regarding the extent of capital account liberalization. The domestic financial sector liberalization indicator in turn includes measures of securities markets and banking sector reforms. The securities markets subindex assesses the quality of the market framework, including the existence of an independent regulator and the extent of legal restrictions on the development of domestic bond and equity markets. The banking subindex captures reductions or removal of interest rate controls (floors or ceilings), credit controls (directed credit and subsidized lending), competition restrictions (limits on branches and entry barriers in the banking market, including licensing requirements or limits on foreign banks), and public ownership of banks. The banking index also captures a measure of the quality of banking supervision and regulation, including the power and independence of bank supervisors, the adoption of Basel capital standards, and the presence of a framework for bank inspections.

b. Capital account liberalization

The second measure of reform in the financial sector pertains to the extent of the external capital account liberalization. The index contains information on a broad set of restrictions including, for example, controls on external borrowing between residents and non-residents, as well as approval requirements for foreign direct investment (FDI).

c. Product market reforms

Turning to the real sector, the product market indicator covers the degree of liberalization in the telecommunication and electricity markets, including the extent of competition in the provision of these services, the presence of an independent regulatory authority, and privatization.

d. Agricultural market reforms

The agricultural sector indicator captures intervention in the market for the main agricultural export commodity in each country. It measures the extent of public intervention in the market going from total monopoly or monopsony in production, transportation or marketing (i.e., the presence of marketing boards), the presence of administered prices, public ownership of relevant producers or concession requirement to free market.

e. Trade reforms

Trade reforms are captured by using two different indicators: one based on tariffs and the other measuring the extent of current account liberalization. The indicator based on tariff liberalization is meant to capture distortions in international trade and is measured by average tariffs.

f. Current account liberalization reforms

The second indicator for measuring reform in the trade sector broadly measures the extent of current account liberalization. It captures the extent to which a government is compliant with its obligations under the IMF’s Article VIII to free from government restriction the proceeds from international trade in goods and services.

Additional details on the sources and specifics of each indicator can be found in IMF (2008) and Table 1.

A. Aggregation and normalization

For each of our six sectors, we construct an aggregate index by averaging the sub-indices for that particular sector (for the cases in which we do have multiple sub-indices, like product market or the financial sector). Each sectoral indicator is then normalized between 0 and 1, where 1 indicates a higher degree of liberalization. “Reform” in any sector is then defined as an annual change in the index. Table 2 reports the pair wise correlations between different types of reforms. Financial sector, trade, current, and capital account reforms are strongly correlated among themselves, and less so with agricultural and product market reforms (with the exception of the financial sector reform which is strongly correlated to product market reforms). Overall the correlations indicate that once the process of reform in a country starts, it probably spreads over to several sectors.10 We run most of our regressions at the sector-country and year level; however as one of our robustness checks we also aggregate the six reform indicators using a principal component analysis.

Table 2.

Correlation between Reform Indicators

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denotes statistical significance at the 1 percent level.

B. Other data

Democracy is measured using the standard, well-established measure of democracy taken from the Polity IV database. In particular, we use the combined polity2 index ranging from -10 to 10 (-10=high autocracy; 10=high democracy).11 We normalize the index so that 1 indicates the most democratic country and 0 the least democratic regime.

We also include in our specifications the following controls:

  • Initial level of regulation (as measured by the lagged level of the regulation index): this variable can be a proxy for important incentives in favor and against the implementation of structural reforms. Excessive government regulation and/or market failures may be perceived as more costly when the economy is least reformed. At the same time, the beneficiaries of existing large rents may oppose reforms.

  • Economic crisis: According to a widely held view, economic crises foster economic reforms by making evident the cost of stagnation and backwardness. The opposite view maintains that it is easier to implement reforms during periods of economic growth when potential losers can find other opportunities in a booming economy or when countries become richer and have more resources to compensate the losers. In order to test this hypothesis, we use several measures of crisis: a dummy equal to 1 if the country is experiencing inflation larger than 40 percent in that year, a measure for recession (as summarized by a dummy indicating negative growth in per-capita GDP), terms of trade shocks, and banking and debt crisis.12

  • Public expenditures/GDP and real devaluation: Compensation schemes can offset costs associated with reforms. A large government may compensate losers from reforms than a very lean government with a small budget. We use public expenditures/GDP as a proxy of the size of social safety nets. As an alternative measure of compensation, we also control for real devaluation, which could promote exports and therefore help compensate losers from reforms.13

  • Human capital and effectiveness of bureaucracy could also facilitate reforms (Besley and Personn, 2007). We use enrollment in tertiary education from Barro and Lee (2001) as a measure of human capital and bureaucratic quality from the International Country Risk Guide.14

  • Reforms in neighboring countries or in trading partners may affect the adoption of domestic reforms through peer pressure and imitational effects. We use the weighted average of reforms in neighboring countries, where the weights are given by two concepts of distance defined by geography and trade.15

  • The ideology of the ruling government and the form of government may determine the adoption of reforms.16 We capture the ideological orientation of the executive with the indicator left, which is equal to 1 if the executive belongs to a party of the left and 0 if it belongs to a right-wing, centrist or other party. The form of government is proxied by the variable presidential, which takes the value of 1 if the system is directly presidential and 0 if the president is elected by the assembly or parliamentary. The source for these two variables is the Database of Political Institutions from the World Bank.17

Table A1 provides the summary statistics for the key variables used in the empirical analysis.

IV. Empirical strategy

The unit of analysis is a sector-country-year observation (there are 6 sectors, 150 countries, and 45 years); the resulting dataset is a panel of 20,123 observations. We define reform as a change over time in the index of regulation for each of the six sectors, s, in country c at time t:

reforms,c,t≡Indexs,c,t−Indexs,c,t−1,

Our baseline specification is as follows:

reforms,c,t=α Indexs,c,t−1+β democracyc,t−1+ϕ Xc,t−1+δs+γc+χt+δsγc+δsχt+εs,c,t(1)

where

δs, γc and χt are sector, country, and year fixed effects, respectively, and Xct-1 are country-specific and time-varying controls to be described below. δsγc and δsχt represent the interactions between country and sector; and sector and time fixed effects respectively. We also control for the lagged level of the index to identify the existence of convergence toward some possible country specific levels of regulation.

The dependent variable (reform) is highly persistent; for this reason the error terms in specification (1) may also exhibit serial correlation.18 We allow for first-order serial correlation in the error terms: εct = ρεct-1+ uct.19 In specifications (2) and (4), we allow the serial correlation coefficient in the error term to be country-sector specific.20 In specification (3), we allow the serial correlation coefficient to be country specific. In Table 7b we also test the robustness of our results by clustering the error terms at the country level.

Our first specification includes only sector, country, and time fixed effects (Table 3, column 1). The coefficient on the lagged level of the index is negative and significant at the 1 percent level, indicating convergence toward country specific levels of regulation. The coefficient on the lagged level of democracy is significant at the 1 percent level. The magnitude of the estimated effect implies that a one standard deviation increase in the democracy index explains 7 percent variability in reforms. In addition, moving to a complete democracy in the long-run is associated with a 0.22 (=−βα) increase in the index of reform (using the coefficients of column 1).

Table 3.

Reforms and Democracy

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Note. The estimators are within estimators and allow for first-order autoregressive disturbance term.***, ** and * denote statistical significance at 1, 5 and 10 percent respectively.

We then add country-sector specific effects, and sector-year specific effects and both of them (column 2, 3 and 4 respectively). The interactions between country and sector fixed effects take into account that reforms are inherently different across countries, e.g., trade sector reforms in India have different characteristics than banking reforms in Brazil (Specification 2). The interactions between sector and year effects account for the possibility of global reform waves across all countries (Specification 3). Specification 4 is the most demanding because it includes all the individual fixed effects and possible two-way interactions. Notice that we cannot control for country-time effects, since the main variable of interest, which is democracy, tends to be country-time varying. The results are very similar across specifications. The magnitude of the coefficients on the democracy variable ranges from 0.02 to 0.03 in columns 2-4.

The results in Table 3 show that the correlation between (past) democracy level and the adoption of reforms is not driven by country or sector-fixed characteristics or by the fact that there was a worldwide movement toward reforms and democracy, or any interactions between country-sector and sector-time fixed characteristics.

If the correlation between economic reforms and democracy is not due to spurious correlation owing to a common trend, could it be driven by other country-time varying omitted variables? The next subsection checks whether this correlation is robust to the inclusion of several variables, which (current theories suggest) may explain both economic reforms and democracy, i.e., the possible bias deriving from country-sector-time varying omitted variables.

A. Additional controls

Reforms may be triggered by a wide range of factors other than democracy. Following the theoretical literature reviewed above, in Table 4 we control for the following possible determinants of reforms: a measure of crisis (a dummy equal to 1 if the country experiences inflation larger than 40 percent)21, public expenditure/GDP and real devaluation, human capital and bureaucratic quality, reforms in neighbors, and political variables (columns 1-5).

Table 4.

Reforms and Democracy: Robustness to Controls

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Note. The estimators are within estimators and allow for first-order autoregressive disturbance term. All regressions control for country sector, year fixed effects and country*sector and sector*year interactions. ***, ** and * denote statistical significance at 1, 5 and 10 percent respectively.

In many countries, difficult fiscal situations were associated with monetization of deficit and high inflation. For this reason, we take hyperinflation (defined as inflation larger than 40 percent) as an indicator of (unresolved) fiscal crisis. Not surprisingly, episodes of hyperinflation appear to reduce the probability of reforming (Column 1), although the effect is small and significant only at the 10% level. Moreover, when we include all the controls in column (6), only initial structural conditions and democracy appear to be significant in explaining reforms22. Bureaucratic quality and public expenditure/GDP also appear to matter but with coefficients which are low and only significant at the 10% level.

Of all the variables, reforms in neighboring countries appear to spur domestic reforms.23 This result, which extends the results of IMF (2004) on OECD countries, is also in line with Buera, Monge, and Primiceri (2008), who find a spillover effect from beliefs in neighboring countries. The inclusion of these variables does not decrease the significance of democracy in explaining the adoption of reforms.

B. Endogeneity

Another source of bias derives from the fact that reforms themselves may have an effect on democracy. In order to deal with this issue we have two approaches: 1) we use instrumental variables, and 2) we check if reforms cause democracy (in the final section of the paper).

While an ideal source of exogenous variation of democracy is difficult to find, we use democracy in neighboring countries as an instrument where we introduce the concept of political distance to define the neighbors. The idea behind this instrument is that democracy in political allies has influence on domestic democracy but no direct impact on a country’s ability to reform. For instance, the political alliance between the U.S. and Western Europe had surely an effect on democracy in Western Europe but not a direct effect on the reform level in Europe.24

Table 5A shows the regressions using lagged democracy in political neighbors as an instrumental variable. As expected, the first-stage F statistics confirm the relevance of democracy in neighbors in promoting the democratic process in the domestic economy (the first stage of our IV regression is presented in Table 5B). The results in our second stage show that, consistent with the OLS specification, there is evidence for a strong and positive effect of democracy on reforms. Notice that the estimated effect is not statistically significant in the specification which includes all the controls (column 1c). The magnitude of the estimated effect is, however, not significantly different from Column 1b, which uses a larger sample and a restricted set of controls suggesting that the statistical insignificance in specification 1c is likely to be driven by the large standard errors from the smaller sample. The regression in column 1d, where the sample is the same as column 1c but without the inclusion of controls, indeed confirms that this is the case.

Table 5a.

Reforms and Democracy: Instrumental Variables Second Stage

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Note. Lagged democracy is instrumented by (lagged) democracy in neighboring countries. All regressions control for country sector, year fixed effects and country*sector and sector*year interactions. ***, ** and * denote statistical significance at 1, 5 and 10 percent respectively.
Table 5b.

Reforms and Democracy: Instrumental Variables First Stage

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Note. All regressions control for country sector, year fixed effects and country*sector and sector*year interactions. ***, ** and * denote statistical significance at 1, 5 and 10 percent respectively.

C. Regressions by sector

Does democracy have a differential effect across sectors? Alternatively, are the results presented above driven by a particular sector? We explore this possibility by looking at the impact of democracy on different sectors. The results in Table 6 show that, with the exception of product markets (electricity/telecommunication), democracy promotes reforms in all other sectors, with the estimated effect being statistically significant at the one percent level in all sectors. The fact that democracy is not significant in explaining reforms in electricity/telecommunications may be due to the fact that global waves (which are captured by year effects) drive the adoptions of reforms in these sectors.

Table 6.

Reforms and Democracy: By Reform

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Note. The estimators are within estimators and allow for first-order autoregressive disturbance term. All regressions control for country and year fixed effects. ***, ** and * denote statistical significance at 1, 5 and 10 percent respectively.

We prefer the general specification that encompasses all sectors in order to maximize the number of observations so that we can control for country, reform, and year fixed effects and (most importantly) their interactions as shown in Table 3.

D. Other robustness checks

In Table 7a, we carry out several robustness checks.25 In columns 1a–1b and 2a–2b, the sample is restricted to communist and developing countries respectively (we estimate two regressions for each subsample with and without the inclusion of controls). In columns 3a-3b, we use a zero-one definition of democracy (as in Giavazzi and Tabellini, 2005), where democracy=1 if polity2 has positive values. Using a zero-one definition of democracy does not change our results (the results are weaker when we include all the controls, but this is driven by the fact that the sample size is much smaller, in column 3c we indeed show that the impact of democracy on reform on the restricted sample but without the inclusion of controls is also not significant). Table 7b shows that the results are also robust to different standard error corrections (instead of explicitly allowing for an AR(1) term in the model, the standard errors are clustered at the country-reform level) (column 1). Reforms in trading partners (column 2) and reforms in other sectors (column 3) also do not alter our main conclusion, and the results are also robust to a variety of crisis definitions (negative per-capita GDP growth, banking and debt crises and terms-of-trade shocks-columns 4 to 7). We also find very similar results when we follow Giavazzi and Tabellini (2005) and include a political reform variable defined as a dummy taking the value of 1 in the years after democratization (where democratization is defined as the event of becoming a democracy, given that a country was not a democracy in the previous year)26.

Table 7a.

Reforms and Democracy: Robustness Checks

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Note. In Columns 1a-1b and 2a-2b, the sample is restricted to communist and developing countries respectively. In Columns 3a-3b, we use a zero-one definition of democracy (as in Giavazzi and Tabellini, 2005), where democracy=1 if polity2 has positive values. The estimators are within estimators and allow for first-order autoregressive disturbance term. All regressions control for country and year fixed effects and country*sector and sector*year interactions. ***, ** and * denote statistical significance at 1, 5 and 10 percent respectively.
Table 7b.

Reforms and Democracy: Additional Robustness Checks

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Note. The estimators are within estimators and allow for first-order autoregressive disturbance term. In Column (1), instead o f explicitly allowing for an AR(1) term in the model, the standard errors are clustered at the country-reform level. In Column (8), political reform is a dummy variable taking a value of 1 in the years after democratization. Democratization is defined as the event of becoming a democracy, given that a country was not a democracy in the previous year. All regressions control for country and year fixed effects and country*sector and sector*year interactions. ***, ** and * denote statistical significance at 1, 5 and 10 percent respectively.

By including the lagged level of reform, the specifications so far have assumed that there is (conditional) convergence in the reform adoption.27 However, unlike growth regressions, there is no theoretical reason why we should expect convergence in the level of regulation. In order to test if our results depend on this assumption, we replicate the specification in Table 3 without the lagged reform index using the following specification:

ΔIndexs,c,t=βdemocracyc,t−1+ϕXc,t−1+δs+γc+χt+δsγc+δsχt+εs,c,t(2)

Column (9) in Table 7b reports the results from estimating Equation (2). The estimated coefficient on lagged (democracy) is positive and statistically significant at the 1 percent level. The magnitude of the estimated coefficient (β= 0.011) is smaller than in Table 3.28 This coefficient, however, is not exactly comparable to the coefficient in the previous regressions in Table 3 given that the magnitude of the estimated coefficient on democracy in this regression can be interpreted only as the effect of democracy on the rate of adoption of structural reforms rather than on the steady-state level.29

Finally, in Table 8, we find some evidence for non-linear effects of democracy on reforms: the more democratic the country is initially, the easier it is to reform.30

Table 8.

Reforms and Democracy: Flexible Functional Form

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Note. The estimators are within estimators and allow for first-order autoregressive disturbance term. ***, ** and * denote statistical significance at 1, 5 and 10 percent respectively.

E. The feedback effect

In this section, we check whether economic reforms could foster the democratic process in a country. Giavazzi and Tabellini (2005) find evidence of a possible feedback effect from economic liberalization (when looking only at the trade sector) and the democratic process. We test for the possibility of a feedback effect from reforms to democracy by estimating the following regression

Δdemocracyc,t=αdemocracyc,t−1+βreformss,c,t−1+δs+γc+χt+εc,t(3)

Overall, we find that democracy promotes reform, while we do not find any evidence that reforms promote the democratic process (Table 9a).31 Our results therefore do not support a reverse causality story.32 We also repeat the same exercise reform by reform and find little evidence of feedback for most reforms with the exception of reforms in domestic financial sector and current account. Reforms in these sectors seem to reduce the probability of democratization. The results are qualitatively similar to Giavazzi and Tabellini (2005), who argue that for trade reforms, “causality is more likely to run from political to economic liberalizations rather than vice versa”.

Table 9a.

Reforms and Democracy: Feedback Effects

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Note. The estimators are within estimators and allow for first-order autoregressive disturbance term. ***, ** and * denote statistical significance at 1, 5 and 10 percent respectively.
Table 9b.

Reform and democracy: Feedback Effects

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Note. The estimators are within estimators and allow for first-order autoregressive disturbance term. ***, ** and * denote statistical significance at 1, 5 and 10 percent respectively.

F. Factor analysis

In this section, we implement a different approach from the panel analysis presented above. To take into account the possibility that the reform process is one unique process common to all sectors, we undertake a factor analysis of our measures of reforms in the six sectors. In particular, we extract the first principal component from the whole dataset with all the data on reforms for each sector.33 The results are reported in Table 10. The impact of democracy seems to be relevant for the overall tendency of a country to reform (the coefficient on the lagged level of democracy is significant at the 1 percent level): moving to a complete democracy in the long-run is associated with a 0.03 increase in the index of reform (the magnitude doubles when we instrument for lagged democracy using lagged democracy in neighboring countries). On the other hand, we do not find any evidence of a feedback effect from the impact of the overall tendency of a country to reform on democracy.

Table 10.

Reforms and Democracy: Principal Component

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Note. The estimators are within estimators and allow for first-order autoregressive disturbance term. ***, ** and * denote statistical significance at 1, 5 and 10 percent respectively. In Column (2), lagged democracy is instrumented by (lagged) democracy in neighboring countries.

V. Conclusions

The question of whether democratic countries favor economic reforms is central to the political economy literature. Political economists study why apparently welfare-enhancing reforms are postponed or adopted with long delays and the presence (or the absence) of democracy is one of the main causes investigated. Unfortunately, despite the vast theoretical literature and limited empirical evidence (restricted to some set of countries, to some reforms and to some periods), the answer to this question has been tentative because of data limitations, which has also limited the techniques that can be used.

This paper answers this question using a novel dataset on structural reforms, which encompasses several sectors and many countries for several years. This dataset allows us to control for a set of possible omitted variables, including country and reform fixed effects, possible two-way interactions between the fixed effects and waves of reforms.

The main conclusions of the papers are that 1) democracy and economic reforms are positively correlated (after controlling for country and reform-specific characteristics, any interaction between country and reform characteristics, and global reform waves); 2) this correlation is robust even after we control for standard factors, which are usually correlated with reforms and democracy, including bureaucratic quality and education, and political stability; 3) the correlation is also robust to the variables that are usually associated with reforms (but not necessarily with democracy) such as crises, neighboring country effects, and compensation schemes; and 4) there is no evidence that economic reforms pave the way for political reforms.

The strong correlation between (lagged) democracy and the adoption of economic reforms, even controlling for many possible omitted factors as well as the finding that past economic reforms are not associated with the adoption of democracy, point to the fact there is probably a causal link from democracy to reforms.

These strong results call for an effort to study the precise mechanisms through which democracy has an impact on economic reforms.

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Appendix Tables

Table 1.

Summary Statistics

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The summary statistics correspond to samples used in Tables 4, 5, 8a and 8b.
Table 2A.

Country Codes in Figure 2

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Table A3.

Country Groups in Figure 2

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