Civil Liberties and Economic Development: the Role of Culture in a Property Rights Approach
Abstract: This paper is an attempt to contribute to the literature on the relationship between economic development and democratic institutions. The paper focuses on civil liberties and interprets them in a framework in which there is no dividing line drawn between “civil” and “property” rights. An important distinction that is made is rather the one between the “scope” of rights and the level of their enforcement as two different dimensions of a constitutional decision. The paper shows that this framework suggests a possible mechanism for informal factors to affect the level of civil liberties that are provided by a rent-seeking government. The argument is that informal factors that are less benign towards rent seeking will provide more incentives for the rent seeking government to make it possible for a wider scope of rights to be used in production. The paper provides some simple regression results that are in line with the main argument.
