Political Institutions, Intertemporal Cooperation, and the Quality of Policies

Abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. The views and interpretations in this document are those of the authors and should not be attributed to the Inter-American Development Bank, or to any individual acting on its behalf. This paper may be freely reproduced provided credit is given to the Research Department, Inter-American Development Bank. Terms of use: Documents inThe Research Department (RES) produces a quarterly newsletter, IDEA (Ideas for Development in the Americas), as well as working papers and books on diverse economic issues. To obtain a complete list of RES publications, and read or download them please visit our web site at: http://www.iadb.org/res. 3 Abstract 1While economists have tended to focus on specific public policies when developing recommendations, the achievement of welfare objectives might depend more on the quality of policies than their content. This paper develops several measures of the qualities of policies across countries, arguing that the quality of public policies depends on each polity's ability to strike intertemporal transactions necessary to develop and sustain effective policies. The analytical framework developed here indicates that this ability depends on several characteristics of political institutions, such as congressional capabilities, judicial independence, and bureaucratic independence and professionalism. The empirical evidence presented supports this idea. The measures of policy quality developed here could be utilized for other purposes, including the determination of conditions under which more public spending in a given area is likely to generate the desired outcomes.

The politics of financial development: The role of interest groups and government capabilities

“…37 If data availability were not a restriction, bureaucratic quality could be combined with two other similar traits of a polity that capture similar long-term investments such as judiciary independence and capabilities of the congress (Scartascini, Stein, and Tommasi, 2009). 38 This is the same source of institutional quality data used in Baltagi, Demetriades and Siong Hook (2009).…”

Are We All Playing the Same Game? The Economic Effects of Constitutions Depend on the Degree of Institutionalization

“…Such impressions are relevant from the perspective of capturing "beliefs," but it would be desirable to complement them in future work with more objective indicators of the strength and cumulative investments in each of those institutions. The indicators used here have been assembled within the context of a wider investigation, in which in-depth indicators were constructed for the case of 17 Latin American countries on the basis of expert surveys and comparative studies of public policymaking (IDB, 2005;Stein et al, 2008;and Scartascini, Stein and Tommasi, 2009). The indicators used here, compiled from international databases, show high levels of correlation with the other in-depth indicators constructed for the Latin American cases.…”

On the Institutionalization of Congress(Es) in Latin America and Beyond

“…One of the mechanisms by which stronger congresses affect welfare outcomes may be through Previous work has measured and analyzed the impact of various features of policies (Stein andTommasi, 2007, andTommasi, 2007, within Latin America;andScartascini, Stein andArdanaz, Scartascini and, for a wider international sample). These variables include: Stability (the extent to which policies are stable over time), Adaptability (the extent to which policies are be adjusted when they fail or when circumstances change), Coherence and coordination (the degree to which policies are consistent with related policies, and result from well-coordinated actions among the actors who participate in their design and implementation), Quality of implementation and enforcement (the degree to which policies are implemented and enforced properly after the approval in Congress), Publicregardedness (the degree to which policies pursue the public interest), and Efficiency (the extent to which policies reflect an allocation of scarce resources that ensures high returns).…”