Income and Democracy

Income and democracy: Revisiting the evidence

Enrique Moral-Benito & Cristian Bartolucci
Economics Letters, December 2012, Pages 844–847

Abstract: In an influential paper, Acemoglu et al. (2008) find that the positive correlation between income per capita and the level of democracy across countries vanishes once country-specific effects are accounted for. In this paper, we find evidence of a non-linear effect from income to democracy even after controlling for country-specific effects. In particular, our findings point to the existence of a positive effect only in low-income countries.

Nod to Kevin Lewis