Autonom, genügsam und solidarisch. Leise Töne sind seine Sache nicht, auch nicht im Alter von über 70 Jahren. Ex-Präsident Sarkozy verglich seine Antiwachstumsbewegung décroissance schon einmal mit Terrorismus - zu Unrecht, denn gewaltsame Veränderungen sind Serge Latouche fremd. Was er...

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...

Using data on a panel of 56 democratic countries in the period 1975-2004, we find evidence of a negative association between political stability and economic growth which is stronger and empirically more robust in countries with high bureaucratic costs. Motivated by these results, which contrast...

Long-run development (in income) causes a large fall in the share of agriculture commonly known as the agricultural transition. We confirm that this conventional wisdom is strongly supported by the data. Long-run development (in income) also causes a large increase in democracy known as the...