The Regulation of Exit: Political Economy of Passport Costs
Abstract: The freedom of international travel could be restricted not only by visa requirements of destination countries, but also by the costs of compliance with regulations of exit in the countries of origin, first and foremost of obtaining a passport for foreign travel. Such costs exhibit profound variations around the world – from a fraction of a per cent of the GDP per capita to over 100%, and have a strong impact on international migration flows (McKenize, 2007). We argue in this paper that an association between democracy and the regulation of exit is non-linear. For stronger democracies one can observe the usual negative association between regulatory burden and democratic quality – when bureaucracy becomes somewhat less accountable to the society, it starts abusing its regulatory powers to extract rent. However, such association does not extend onto weak democracies and autocracies – over this range of political regimes the cost of passports flattens and even shows sign of declining when democratic quality drops from intermediate to low levels.
