Does democracy promote economic development? This paper reviews recent attempts to address this question that exploited within-country variation. It shows that the answer is largely positive, but also depends on the details of democratic reforms. First, the sequence of economic vs political...

The remarkable success of Sweden over the past 15 years has come after decades of sluggish growth, during which Sweden managed to lose its substantial lead in per-capita income. This substantiates the view that welfare cost and high taxes reduce growth and endanger competitiveness. Since then,...

This essay argues that economic systems should be defined in terms of clusters of complementary institutions. To show how such an approach can be carried out, I use a cluster analysis technique and data on forty different economic institutions in OECD nations to isolate four quite different...