DE - Teses de Doutoramento / Ph.D. Thesis
Permanent URI for this collection
Browse
Browsing DE - Teses de Doutoramento / Ph.D. Thesis by advisor "Abreu, Alexandre"
Now showing 1 - 1 of 1
Results Per Page
Sort Options
- Institutions, geography and economic prosperity : the case of landlocked countriesPublication . Basnet, Subarna; Abreu, AlexandreThis study engages with, and contributes to, the debate around the determinants of economic growth and prosperity, with special reference to the case of landlocked developing countries. Two main lines of explanation are confronted, summed up by the headings ‘geography’ – landlocked countries are poorer because of the geographical constraints to their participation in international trade – and ‘institutions’ – landlocked countries are poorer because they happen to have worse economic and political institutions, not because of landlockedness per se. The study adopts a cross-country empirical approach combining two main methods, both of which draw on institutional data from the Center for Systemic Peace, Freedom House, The Heritage Foundation and World Governance Indicators. In the first part of the empirical analysis, a comparative descriptive examination is undertaken of the political and economic institutions in various regional groups of landlocked countries. This confirms the hypothesis that European landlocked nations have better economic and political institutions than non- European landlocked countries, but also finds that several institutional variables are non- significantly or even significantly but negatively associated with GDP per capita across the various regional groups of landlocked countries. The second part of the empirical analysis adopts an econometric panel data approach, including a series of alternative models (namely Pooled Least Squares, Fixed Effects, Random Effects and Correlated Random Effects Models) and different specifications, to look at the impact of seventeen institutional variables, in interaction with alternative proxies for landlockedness, upon the (log) level of GDP per capita. We find that several institutional variables are significant predictors of the level of prosperity, but others are non-significant and others still are significantly but negatively associated with GDP per capita. By contrast, landlockedness appears as a powerful predictor of the income level even after controlling for the effect of institutions. We conclude that institutions probably do matter for economic growth and long-term prosperity, but some institutions probably have more complicated and complex relationships with growth than usually assumed, and the question of which institutions to consider and how to properly assess and measure them is not straightforward. Landlockedness, by contrast, seems to be an unequivocal obstacle to economic prosperity.