To the best of our knowledge, the empirical corpus of work on the origins and persistence of democracy has not evaluated the impact of governments' fiscal independence from peoples' taxes on the quality of democracy. Our proxy for fiscal independence is the component 1C titled "government...

This report analyzes the changes in economic freedom, political institutions, and performance of 25 former centrally planned (FCP) economies following the collapse of communism. The degree of economic freedom among these countries varied considerably. The FCP countries with higher levels of...

Development is a process and there are at least four phases of the process: (1) pre-development, (2) initial growth, (3) improved productivity, and (4) receding growth. Other things constant, the growth of per capita GDP will be higher in phases 2 and 3 than phases 1 and 4. The development...