What determines the quality of institutions

By Roumeen Islam. 2002

179 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In trying to explain institutional quality, different authors have come to conflicting conclusions. In tackling the problem themselves, the authors show three things. First, openness is positively and pretty robustly associated with institutional quality. To minimize selection bias, the authors use data sets with the greatest cross-country coverage, though they also test the significance of the variables for smaller sample sizes. The results confirm that both natural and policy measures of openness are important. Concentration of trade in natural resource exports continues to be associated with poor institutional quality after openness in trade is accounted for. Second,"social"variables, such as income inequality or ethnic diversity, are not associated with institutional quality. The significance of the inequality variable disappears when continent dummy variables are included for Africa and Latin America. Third, features of specific institutions, such as freedom of the press and checks and balances in the political system, are positively associated with overall perceptions of institutional quality. These findings hold strongly across different data sets and samples even after the authors control for the variables commonly used in the literature.

Subfields: Development, Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/797bb6165f01a54a9b558c922cbad71351d90c66

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Development

In Economics and Econometrics

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

THE DETERMINANTS OF INSTITUTIONAL QUALITY. MORE ON THE DEBATE (2013, unknown): “Also Islam and Montenegro (2002) state that, when controlling for development level, openness affects some institutional quality variables but not others.”
The quality of institutions: A genetic programming approach (2008, background): “The study of the quality of institutions include works such as La Porta et al (1999) or Islam and Montenegro (2002).”