free lunch

the blog about nothing and everything

Wednesday, March 23, 2005

Mean Dynasty

In East Asia the Philippines scores the highest in terms of women participation in politics as a good percentage of elected officials are women. Contrary to other international evidence however, the increased participation of women has not resulted in lower corruption. The Philippines still ranks high on the corruption index. Perhaps the reason is because women participation is partly due to the impact of term limits on politicians. Wives/daughters will run in place of their husbands/fathers whose term limit is up this perpetuates the political dynasty, a mainstay in Philippine politics. This paper presents evidence on the negative impact of political dynasties (defined in this study as the proportion of provincial officials related to each other by blood or affinity) on economic growth rate in the provinces of the Philippines by regressing growth rate on selected variables:

Growth, inequality and politics revisited: a developing-country case SHORT COMMUNICATION
Economics Letters, Volume 79, Issue 1, April 2003, Pages 53-58
Arsenio M. Balisacan and Nobuhiko Fuwa

Determinants of provincial growth: instrumental variable estimation (t-ratios in parentheses)
Independent variable : Provincial Growth
Log(per capita expenditure -0.088 (10.24)
1988)
Mortality rate -0.001 (3.04)
Literacy rate 0.0001 (0.16)
Dynasty -0.026 (2.24)
Irrigation area 0.002 (0.14)
Land Gini 0.001 (3.05)
Chg. CARP 0.006 (2.11)
Chg. Electricity -0.00003 (0.13)
Chg. Ag. terms of trade 0.016 (0.52)
Chg. Road density 0.018 (0.64)
Constant 0.849 (8.52)
Adj. R 0.6799
Sample size 65

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home