This paper is an attempt to contribute to the literature on the relationship between economic development and democratic institutions. The paper focuses on civil liberties and interprets them in a framework in which there is no dividing line drawn between “civil” and “property” rights....

Does democracy promote economic growth? There is still an ongoing debate over the economic implications of democracy, and this question has gained critical importance particularly in the African context, where a wave of democratization in the early 1990s coincided with the start of a new era of...

In recent years, a growing body of economic literature has focused on the phenomenon of the so-called middle-income trap (MIT). The term usually refers to countries that have experienced rapid growth and thus quickly reached middle-income status, but then failed to overcome that income range to...

We examine the impact of geo-referenced World Bank development programs on subnational development using equally sized grid cells with a spatial resolution of 0.5 decimal degrees latitude x longitude as the unit of investigation. The proposed grid cell approach solves a number of endogeneity...