POLITICAL-ECONOMY, GROWTH AND CONVERGENCE IN LESS-DEVELOPED-COUNTRIES

This paper examines the roles of political and cultural factors in the growth of less-developed countries. We begin by formulating a growth model, similar to that of Baumol-Wolff (1988), based on the revised Summers-Heston (1988) data set. We build upon this base model, using a priori information, to obtain further models which are capable of explaining growth in terms of politics and culture. We find that liberal regimes and Asian countries appear to have potentially high growth rates of real GDP per capita.