Political liberalization and human development: Dynamic effects of political regime change on infant mortality across three centuries (1800-2015)
Political liberalization and human development: Dynamic effects of political regime change on infant mortality across three centuries (1800-2015)
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DOI：
10.1016/j.worlddev.2021.105614
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发表时间：
2021-08-04
影响因子：
6.9
通讯作者：
Higashijima, Masaaki
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Annaka, Susumu;Higashijima, Masaaki
长期以来，比较论者一直在争论民主国家是否会促进人类发展。通过将婴儿死亡率回归到民主的累积分数，最近的研究表明，在解释人类发展方面，悠久的民主传统比目前的民主程度更重要。然而，这种方法面临着几个问题，也无法确定民主改革在某个时间点对未来人类福祉的影响。我们认为，政治自由化鼓励政策制定者采取扶贫政策，但从相对长期来看，这种政策变化更有可能产生实质性成果。使用新收集的172个国家1800至2015年间婴儿死亡率的面板数据，我们检验了我们的理论预期。将误差修正模型应用于这一广泛的时间序列横截面数据，我们发现，政治自由化更有可能立即增加获得公共服务的平等机会，但从长期来看，婴儿死亡率会降低。这些结果表明，民主改革确实对人类福利产生了积极影响，但这种影响可能会随着时间的推移而出现，也可能会随着时间的推移而减弱。我们的研究表明，政策制定者可能需要在推进政治自由化方面进行不懈的投资，以继续改善发展中世界的人类福祉。(C)2021年提交人(S)。由爱思唯尔有限公司出版。这是一篇在CC by License(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).下的开放获取文章
It has been long debated among comparativists whether democratic states advance human development. By regressing infant mortality rates on a cumulative score of democracy, recent studies have suggested that a long tradition of democracy is of greater importance than the present degree of democracy to explain human development. This approach, however, faces several issues and also fails to pinpoint the effect of a democratic reform at a certain point in time on future human welfare. We argue that polit-ical liberalization encourages policymakers to adopt poverty-alleviating policies, but such a policy change is more likely to bear substantive fruit over the relatively long run. Using newly collected panel data on infant mortality rates from 1800 to 2015 from 172 countries, we test our theoretical expectations. Applying error correction models to this extensive time-series cross-sectional data, we find that political liberalization is more likely to increase equal access to public services immediately but that infant mor-tality rates are reduced in the long run. These results suggest that democratic reforms do have a positive effect on human welfare, but the effect might appear with a passage of time as well as shrinks over time. Our research implies that policymakers may need to make tireless investments in the advancement of political liberalization to continue improving human well-being in the developing world. (c) 2021 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).