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The culmination of a long-lasting and impressive research program, this book summarizes the relationship between economic development with income on the one hand and the evolution of institutions on the other; the transition of countries from one economic and social system to another. The author considers the transitions of two types of institutions: The first is external; it is legal-administrative systems with staff and buildings. The political system and the economic system are considered. The second consists of traditions and beliefs. Here corruption and religiosity are considered. Contrary to the claim that institutions are causal to development, this book demonstrates that the main direction of causality is from income to institutions. As countries get wealthy, they become secular democracies with low corruption and a mixed economic system. In this impressive coda, Paldam shows that the evolution of institutions is not causal to the economic growth process but rather follows it.

AbstractMeta‐analysis studies the literature reporting estimates of one parameter, which at present is assumed positive. The purpose of the analysis is to find the best meta‐average, which corrects the mean of the estimates for bias. The two main biases are: (i) Publication bias, where the correction nearly always makes the average smaller. (ii) Omitted variable bias, where the correction typically makes the average larger. Consequently, the bias is likely to increase if the correction is for the wrong bias. This allows a game of meta‐mining to be played. A case study demonstrates the scope for meta‐mining, and that it has been done. The game of meta‐mining is surely against the purpose of meta‐analysis.

The paper is an empirical study of eight democracy indices and income. The aggregation problem for these indices is large, and thus the gray zone of measurement uncertainty is wide. The indices have no natural scale. Even the top anchor of full democracy is treated differently. In addition, the indices are conceptually different, use different scales, etc. However, they are still highly correlated. Income and all eight indices have one and only one common factor, which is the Democratic Transition, except in the OPEC/MENA sample. Within-project indices are even more correlated. Thus, the details of the assessments used by each project are more important than the conceptual differences. A country-by-country comparison is made of Polity and the Polyarchy index after it is converted to the Polity scale. Many countries are treated differently by the indices. The difference between the two is an estimate of the measurement uncertainty for democracy indices. It is almost three Polity points.

Political regimes are stable most years, but sometimes they jump. The stable years are periods of political status-quo equilibrium. To break a status quo requires a triggering event. The paper is an attempt to identify and classify what close observers at the time thought were the triggering events in a sample of 262 larger regime changes between 1960 and 2015 in 170 countries. The sample consists of all changes in the Polity index with a numerical rating above 3 (i.e. of 4 or more). The source for the triggering events is country-relevant articles in The Economist. Triggering events are classified in a (2 x 2) table with four cells: (DP) domestic political, (DE) domestic economic, (XP) external political, and (XE) external economic, which remains empty. By far the most common is (DP), but the domestic political events prove to be very different. Thus, most jumps are exogenous in the perspective of development.

The cross-country data for honesty/corruption and income has a correlation of about 0.75, and the data have a typical transition path; but the correlation of the growth rate and honesty is negative. Thus, the short and long-run findings are contradictory, and it is shown that the contradiction lasts a dozen years. The transition of corruption happens relatively late and works through changes in institutions. To catch all institutions the Polity-index is used for the political dimension and the Fraser-index of economic freedom for the economic one. The two indices explain as much as income, but they both have a transition, so the relations are partly spurious. To identify the non-spurious part of the relation and sort out causality, the D-index is defined as the difference between the corruption index and the transition path. Institutional instability increases corruption, but when institutions stabilize, both democracy and economic freedom increase honesty.

The paper looks at the effect of instability of political and economic institutions, using the Polity and the Fraser indices to characterize the two dimensions of society. The indices are used to derive three measures of instability: VP and VF are the average numerical annual change in each index, and ZP is the fraction of years under anarchy. All three have a negative correlation to growth. Two main theories are considered: One is the long-run transition-link: High growth in low- and middle-income countries gives a faster transition and hereby more system instability. The second is the short-run investment link: System instability gives an uncertain and unpredictable environment that harms investment, and hence growth. The combination of the two links is a main reason why the potential high growth of less developed countries is so difficult to achieve.