Individualism–collectivism, governance and economic development

By Andreas P. Kyriacou. 2015

118 citations recorded by the source corpus.

While an individualist society prizes personal control, autonomy and individual accomplishments, a collectivist society puts a premium on loyalty and cohesion and imposes mutual obligations in the context of in-groups. It has been argued that individualism will promote economic development directly by sharpening individual incentives to invest, innovate and accumulate wealth. In this article, I argue that the individualist-collectivist dimension can also affect development through its impact on governance. The in-group favoritism inherent to collectivist societies is likely to engender corruption, nepotism and clientelism in the public sphere. In individualist societies, the relative weakness of in-group pressures and an emphasis on personal achievement and worth will contribute towards a more meritocratic and efficient public sector. My empirical evidence confirms the strong positive relationship between individualism and government quality. Moreover, I provide robust empirical evidence showing that the expected direct positive impact of individualism on economic development disappears when additionally controlling for governance, a finding which suggests that insofar as individualism affects development it does so because it promotes good governance.

Subfields: Demography, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0e76c951a2722f67f5f5bb895f9d440ccf3193be

Citations in the corpus

• Cross‐Country Determinants of Early‐Stage Necessity and Opportunity‐Motivated Entrepreneurship: Accounting for Model Uncertainty (2018, unknown): “However, Kyriacou (2016) argues convincingly that while individualist societies lean toward providing strong “incentives to invest, innovate, and accumulate wealth,” this influence is channeled, at least in part, through high-quality political institutions that also result from the same forces.”