Development performance and the institutions of governance: Evidence from east Asia and Latin America

The purpose of this paper is three-fold: to assess the extent to which the institutional characteristics of governance can be captured with available data, to evaluate the ability of such measures to explain development performance across regions, countries and time, and to examine the extent to which different governance characteristics are complements (rather than substitutes) to one another. Using the four operational governance characteristics, we find that, first, in the full sample, all governance characteristics have the expected effects on development performance and, second, both the relative importance of these characteristics and the degree of complementarity/substitutability among them vary by region. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.