BBVA Compass

Abstract: Does democracy improve the quality of life for its citizens? Scholars have long assumed that it does, but recent research has called this orthodoxy into question. This article reviews this body of work, develops a series of causal pathways through which democracy might improve social welfare, and tests two hypotheses: (a) that a country’s level of democracy in a given year affects its level of human development and (b) that its stock of democracy over the past century affects its level of human development. Using infant mortality rates as a core measure of human development, we conduct a series of time-series—cross-national statistical tests of these two hypotheses. We find only slight evidence for the first proposition, but substantial support for the second. Thus, we argue that the best way to think about the relationship between democracy and development is as a time-dependent, historical phenomenon.

Abstract: We rely on demand and supply-side information to measure the extent of financial inclusion at country level for eighty-two developed and less-developed countries. We postulate that the degree of financial inclusion is determined by three dimensions: usage, barriers and access to financial inclusion. Weights assigned to the dimensions are determined endogenously by employing a two-stage Principal Component Analysis. Our composite index offers a comprehensive measure of the degree of financial inclusion, easy to understand and compute.