Ratings of institutional quality are widely known and used in academic literature. Among such ratings are some whose compilation procedure took decades to perfect. Dozens of assessments have been accumulated, pertaining to a large and growing list of countries. These ratings use expert...

In this paper we explore current understandings of the influence of political rights, among historical legacies, on economic development. We construct variables for selected political regimes for 1811-2010. We find significant association between individual rights and economic growth. We argue...

The ratings of economic and political institutions are well-known and widely used in the Social Science literature. These ratings are heavily relied on Experts' evaluations with subjective ordinal ranking (i.g., from -10 to 10 points). Such evaluations can be occasionally driven by ideological...

The paper is an English draft version of the text previously published in Chapter 8 in the book "Institucionalnye ogranichenia sovremenogo ekonomicheskogo rosta" - Institutional Constraints on Modern Economic Growth – “Delo” Publishing House Moscow, 2011 In this chapter, the authors tried...

Almost all tax reforms in Israel since 1996 were ‘gradual’, ‘fine-tuning-style', and eventually had zero impact on the economic growth rate. The only exemption – corporate tax rate lowering was caused by the pressure of international competition. Some data and references are provided to...

Small well-motivated groups, including state officials, public and community activists, politicians, etc., proved their capacity to impose burden on the economy. The power to do so in modern Market Democracies could be reached without “unsheathing the sword”. Old fashioned redistribution...

In this paper we tested the hypothesis of the "political" basis for the "economic" rights. We constructed our own variables of political regimes' classification for years 1820-2000. We found significant positive interdependencies between the Democracy's indicators and Economic Growth. Protection...

The ratings of political institutions are well-known and widely used in academic literature. These ratings are mostly based on expert evaluations. However, such evaluations can be subjective and occasionally driven by ideological considerations. In this paper we propose two new indicators of...