The Political Economy of Inclusive Growth

What motivates this project is that, while democracies are generally believed to perform better than autocracies at bringing about development, there is substantial variation in performance both within regime types and within countries. Moreover, there is also a need for research that specifically analyses the political factors that can lead to more inclusive growth. The research project tackles these issues by conducting cross-country studies using macro-level data and within-country studies using meso-level and micro-level data. The cross-country studies analyse the relationship between political regimes, on the one hand, and development outcomes and policy performance, on the other hand, while the within-country studies examine the ways in which political institutions shape the adoption and effectiveness of policies at the subnational level. The selection of countries for within-country studies is to a large extent shaped by the availability of data and variance in both the independent variables (policy, shape of political institutions) as well as the dependent variable (inclusive development) at a sub-national level. Meeting these necessary preconditions well, India as well as Peru both qualified as case studies so far.