Abstract
A growing body of work in economics has pointed towards the crucial importance of government quality for economic development. A major issue emerging in related empirical work has been the need to account for the confounding influence of other factors as well as the presence of reverse causality or the likelihood that development itself may facilitate governance. The potentially key role of government quality in explaining international differences in economic development has led many scholars to try and identify those factors that determine it. This research effort has brought forth the role of numerous variables including social heterogeneity, cultural heritage, and constitutional design. The lion’s share of empirical work has employed measures of government quality based on perceptions. A debate exists about the convenience of conflating government quality with institutional quality. To measure institutional quality, it may be more advisable to generate measures or indicators which capture the extent to which institutions actually constrain governments.
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Kyriacou, A.P. (2019). Government Quality. In: Marciano, A., Ramello, G.B. (eds) Encyclopedia of Law and Economics. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7753-2_46
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7753-2_46
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