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AbstractIt has long been hypothesized that democracy benefits the poor, yet solid empirical evidence for this assertion is scarce. This article provides new global evidence regarding the poverty‐reduction effect of democracy, which we refer to as the Sen Hypothesis. A difference‐in‐differences estimation using cross‐national panel data of over 100 countries from 1995 to 2015 shows that democracy reduces poverty, although the size of the effect varies by the poverty line chosen. The results also show that the effects are channeled by entitling more political rights, increasing freedom of speech and the size of middle classes, and improving governmental quality, and are heterogeneous over time and democratization types.

How to understand the impacts of government effectiveness (GE) on technological innovation has received full attention. But in turn, it is still a puzzle how technological innovation promotes GE. With the intention of providing rigorous empirical evidence to fill the gap, authors efficiently selected variables based on novel machine learning and analyzed the influence mechanism of technological innovation on GE through different models, using panel data from global countries over 20 years. The investigation has revealed that the relationship between technological innovation and GE is not a simple linear relation but a more complicated inverted U-shaped relation. We also distinguished the impacts of technological innovation on GE in countries with diverse democratic and developing levels. This pioneering work has provided new insights to our understanding of innovation diffusion and determinants of GE.

Embedded in the epoch of globalization, initiatives of governmental reforms among countries are intertwined, especially when these countries seek to gain wider experience from their counterparts' suggestible pathways. However, scholars are inclined to oversimplify their analytical frameworks when conducting comparative research on administrative reforms. This paper intends to interpret and analyze such simplification of comparative studies which might result in the continuing promotion of a failing approach or the aimless transplantation of other countries' reform experience and theories, the phenomenon not uncommon in studies of China's administrative practices. This paper reveals an overlooked context, namely, that the adaptation of international theories of institutional reform has not achieved the intended goals in China's case. Through our analysis, we aim to use China's example to highlight the need to consider its social and cultural context in adapting Western administrative theories, and to suggest how scholars can better advise the government in the process of administrative reforms.

China's five‐yearly governmental restructuring has always taken place in lockstep with the Communist Party of China National Congress. Moreover, the theme of every administrative reform in the past three decades has complied with that of theoretical research by foreign scholars during the same period. The Chinese government draws lessons from theories of foreign public administration to explore ways to reform its practices. By means of evaluating the gains and losses of the Chinese government in the abovementioned process, this article points out that theories of Western public administration meet local challenges while contributing to China's reform practices. Through their analyses, we use China's practices as examples to highlight the balance between local concerns and global views and to suggest how scholars can better advise governments in the process of administrative reforms in other developing countries.

Political corruption is one of the structural factors aggravating national poverty, on which there is a consensus. However, it remains controversial what factors constrain the causal mechanisms by which political corruption worsens national poverty. This paper analyzed this using different models with the global panel data of 117 counties from 1992 to 2017, including the instrumental variable model. The authors found that: (1) There was a significant positive correlation between political corruption and national poverty, (2) Political corruption exacerbating national poverty was constrained by primary education and the Gini index, which played a mediating role, (3) The level of foreign direct investment and public services moderated the relationship between political corruption and national poverty. Finally, the authors discussed the potential implications beyond national poverty for theory, method, and policy.

Corruption plagues both developed and developing countries. It is a serious obstacle to China's development that is too perilous to ignore. However, conducting research on corruption, which is characterised as being the most secretive type of behaviour, is particularly difficult. Applying the vector autoregressive model (VAR) to consecutive 36-month data, the authors analyse empirically the corruption status quo and its impact in China. The authors discover short-term negative impacts of the current anti-corruption campaign in China on the economic growth of its state-owned industries, while any positive effects, e.g. improved quality of economic growth, cannot be demonstrated. The objective data used reduce significantly the confusion surrounding traditional (anti-)corruption studies, which have relied heavily on survey data or subjective evaluation. (China/GIGA)