We study the effects of the progressive elimination of the system of industrial regulations on entry and production, known as the “license raj”, on registered manufacturing output, employment, entry and investment across Indian states with different labor market regulations. The effects are found to be unequal depending on the institutional environment in which industries are embedded. In particular, following delicensing, industries located in states with pro-employer labor market institutions grew more quickly than those in pro-worker environments.

We use disaggregated data from the United Nations International Comparison Project and the Penn World Table to examine the association between different components of investment and economic growth over 1960–85. We find that producers ’ machinery and equipment has a very strong association with growth: in our cross section of nations each percent of GDP invested in equipment raises GDP growth rate by 1/3 of a percentage point per year. This is a much stronger association than can be found between any of the other components. We interpret this association as revealing that the marginal product of equipment is about 30 percent per year. The cross nation pattern of equipment prices, quantities, and growth is consistent with the belief that countries with rapid growth have favorable supply conditions for machinery and equipment. The pattern is not consistent with the belief that some third factor both pushes up the rate of growth and increases the demand for machinery and equipment.

Przeworski et al. (2000) challenge the key hypothesis in modernization theory: political regimes do not transition to democracy as per capita incomes rise, they argue. Rather, democratic transitions occur randomly, but once there, countries with higher levels of GDP per capita remain democratic. We retest the modernization hypothesis using new data, new techniques, and a three-way rather than dichotomous classification of regimes. Contrary to Przeworski et al. (2000) we find that the modernization hypothesis stands up well. We also find that partial democracies emerge as among the most important and least understood regime types. The study of democratization is one of the most venerable literatures in comparative politics. It is also one of the most vigorous, as controversies over theory and method interact with empirical research in debates over the origins and determinants of democratic forms of government. In recent years, however, an uncharacteristic lull seems to have descended on this vibrant field—a lull we attribute to the need to absorb the pivotal contribution of Przeworski et al. (2000) (hereafter referenced PACL). Despite the challenges posed by Boix (2002) and Boix and Stokes (2003), rather than igniting debate, as would be right and proper, PACL appear instead to have quenched it. Among the most notable of PACL’s findings is that modernization—specifically, an increase in per capita GDP—is not a causal factor in the process of democratization. Rather, they argue, the positive association between income and democracy results from the reduced likelihood of more modern countries sliding back, as it were, into undemocratic forms of government once having (randomly) become democratic. This finding is now treated as received wisdom. We challenge that finding. The grounds for our dissent are both methodological and substantive. PACL employ a dichotomous classification of political systems, in which governments are either democratic or authoritarian, with rather stringent requirements for being included in the former category. All countries failing to meet the necessary conditions for being a full democracy are then deemed autocratic. This approach, however, ignores the possibility of

We use a randomized evaluation of a Kenyan deworming program to estimate peer effects in technology adoption and to shed light on foreign aid donors’ movement towards sustainable community provision of public goods. Deworming is a public good since much of its social benefit comes through reduced disease transmission. People were less likely to take deworming if their direct first-order or indirect second-order social contacts were exposed to deworming. Efforts to replace subsidies with sustainable worm control measures were ineffective: a drug cost-recovery program reduced take-up 80 percent; health education did not affect behavior, and a mobilization intervention failed. At least in this context, it appears unrealistic for a one-time intervention to generate sustainable voluntary local public goods provision. I.

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Abstract. This article demonstrates that socioeconomic development, emancipative cultural change and democratization constitute a coherent syndrome of social progress – a syndrome whose common focus has not been properly specified by classical modernization theory. We specify this syndrome as ‘human development’, arguing that its three components have a common focus on broadening human choice. Socioeconomic development gives people the objective means of choice by increasing individual resources; rising emancipative values strengthen people’s subjective orientation towards choice; and democratization provides legal guarantees of choice by institutionalizing freedom rights. Analysis of data from the World Values Surveys demonstrates that the linkage between individual resources, emancipative values and freedom rights is universal in its presence across nations, regions and cultural zones; that this human development syndrome is shaped by a causal effect of individual resources and emancipative values on freedom rights; and that this effect operates through its impact on elite integrity, as the factor which makes freedom rights effective.

doubt on the liberals ’ belief that democracy and economic development are mutually reenforcing. Indeed, Guillermo O’Donnell and other radicals argued that democracy was inconsistent with the requirements for develop-ment within the strictures of international capitalism. Strong and weak ver-sions of the radical thesis linking authoritarian regimes to the interests of multinational corporations are tested by analyzing the flow and profitability of U.S. foreign direct investment. Do multinationals benefit materially from autocratic regimes? Pooled cross-sectional and time-series regression analyses of 48 countries, 1950-85, indicate that U.S. multinational corporations have fared best in the developed democracies; but rates of return in the periphery have been greater under authoritarian regimes. Investment flows have not been significantly related to regime type. In the 1950s and early 1960s, as European colonies in Africa and Asia gained their independence, an optimistic consensus regarding economics and politics in the new states emerged: The timely infusion of capital and technology from the developed countries could create the conditions for a &dquo;take-off ’ into sus-tained growth (Bauer and Yamey 1957; Rostow 1960). This would in turn have beneficial political consequences because, as Huntington (1968: 5) explained, liberals believed that &dquo;all good things go together&dquo;: Economic development and democracy were complementary and mutually reenforcing (Lipset 1959; Cole-

We explore the hypothesis that demographic changes which began in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are at the root of the acceleration in growth rates at the dawn of the modern age. During this period, life tables for Geneva and Venice show a decline in adult mortality; French marriage registers reveal an important increase in literacy; historians measure an acceleration of economic growth. We develop an endogenous growth model with a realistic survival law in which rising longevity increases individual incentives to invest in education and fosters growth. We quantitatively estimate that the observed improvements in adult mortality account for 70 % of the growth acceleration in the pre-industrial age.

this article to discuss this concept, both in its generality #Sec 2# and in its speci#c realization illustrated for the Sahel Syndrome 2

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