Democracy and Economic Growth: Evidence in MENA countries

The debate on the effect of democracy on economic growth has been comprehensively growing since 1980s in theoretical and empirical literature. The existing literature provides conflicting views of this relationship. For this reason, the aim of this paper is therefore to empirically investigate this relationship in 17 MENA countries over the period 1983-2012. We explore this relationship by using fixed (FE)/random (RE) effects and generalized method of moments (GMM) system approaches. We show that a priori the sign of the effect is ambiguous. The major empirical is that democracy, measured by Institutionalized Democracy Score, Institutionalized Autocracy Score, Competitiveness of Executive Recruitment, Openness of Executive Recruitment and Executive Constraints have a robust and negative impact on growth in MENA countries. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.