From a new paper by David Mayer-Foulkes. HT: Viviana Di Giovinazzo.
The sample includes 135 countries.
The author explains:
I construct a technology index TECH using a polychoric principal component analysis of number of articles, number of computers, internet subscribers patents by residents, R&D researchers and technicians, mainline telephone subscribers and mobile telephone subscribers, each of these as a proportion of the population.
The review of the human-development literature in the paper is very good.
Does democracy improve the quality of life for its citizens? Scholars have long assumed that it does, but recent research has called this orthodoxy into question. This article reviews this body of work, develops a series of causal pathways through which democracy might improve social welfare, and tests two hypotheses: (a) that a country’s level of democracy in a given year affects its level of human development and (b) that its stock of democracy over the past century affects its level of human development. Using infant mortality rates as a core measure of human development, we conduct a series of time-series—cross-national statistical tests of these two hypotheses. We find only slight evidence for the first proposition, but substantial support for the second. Thus, we argue that the best way to think about the relationship between democracy and development is as a time-dependent, historical phenomenon.
That is the abstract of a new paper by Gerringa, Thackera, and Alfaro. It was published in the latest number of The Journal of Politics.
