Despite some notable achievements in many parts of the planet the gap between the rich and the poor has become wider rather than tighter. On the political sphere success seems much more unequivocal, though. Indeed, beyond a handful of anachronistic exceptions, the world seems to have surrendered...

In the middle of the twentieth century S.M. Lipset sustained that various indicators of economic development were higher in democratic countries than in authoritarian ones, suggesting that development was as a condition to democracy. More recently, though, several authors have shown that there...