民主到底能否促进经济增长:我们最近的两篇工作论文
(2018-04-09 21:08:31)分类: 我自己的工作 |
Hierarchy, Liberty, and Innovation:
Democracy’s Unique Advantage in Promoting Growth Restated
Shiping Tang
Abstract
Bringing together classic defense of liberty and democracy, the political economy of hierarchy, endogenous growth theory, and the new institutional economics on growth, we propose a new institutional theory that identifies democracy’s unique advantage in prompting economic growth. We contend that the channel of liberty-to-innovation is the most critical channel in which democracy holds a unique advantage over autocracy in promoting growth, especially during the stage of growth via innovation. Because all human societies are hierarchical and hierarchy facilitates growth by bringing stability and order yet harms innovation and growth by demanding obedience to authority, an economy must strike a balance between maintaining stability and facilitating innovation. Democracy achieves this balance by protecting liberty whereas autocracy sacrifices innovation for stability. Democracy thus does hold a unique advantage in promoting growth over autocracy, but this advantage is indirect, channel-specific, and conditional. Evidences from three historical cases demonstrate that although key scientific breakthroughs can indeed pop up under autocracies, democracy is a necessary, though insufficient, condition for protecting major scientific breakthroughs that may challenge orthodoxies.
Democracy’s Unique Advantage in Promoting Economic Growth:
Quantitative Evidences for a New Institutional Theory
Rui Tang1 & Shiping Tang2*
(NOTE: This is the working paper version of a paper that is forthcoming from Kyklos, vol. 71, no. 4, Nov. 2018)
Abstract
Bringing together the classic defense of liberty and democracy, the political economy of hierarchy, endogenous growth theory, and the new institutional economics on growth, we propose a new institutional theory that identifies democracy’s unique advantage in prompting economic growth. We contend that the channel of liberty-to-innovation is the most critical channel in which democracy holds a unique advantage over autocracy in promoting growth, especially during the stage of growth via innovation. Our theory thus predicts that democracy holds a positive but indirect effect upon growth via the channel of liberty-to-innovation, conditioned by the level of economic development. We then present quantitative evidence for our theory. To our best knowledge, we are the first to propose such an indirect and conditional effect of democracy upon economic development and provide systematic evidences. Our study promises to integrate and reconcile many seemingly unrelated and often contradictory theories and evidence regarding regime and growth, including providing a possible explanation for the inconclusive results from regressing overall regime score against the rate of economic growth or change in level of GDP per capita.