This paper investigates the political determinants of public sector efficiency using a cross-national data from 117 countries in the period of 2001 to 2010, with a two-stage DEA-Tobit method. The first-stage DEA method finds two types of efficiency frontiers, developing-country frontiers and...

It has long been hypothesized that democracy benefits the poor; however, the hypothesis still lacks solid empirical evidence. This paper contributes to providing new worldwide evidence on the poverty reduction effect of democracy which we refer to as the Amartya Sen hypothesis. The...