DP8139 Legal Institutions and Economic Development
Author(s): | Thorsten Beck |
Publication Date: | December 2010 |
Keyword(s): | Economic development, Legal institutions, Legal system indicators, Property rights |
JEL(s): | K1, K4, O16, O43, P14 |
Programme Areas: | Financial Economics |
Link to this Page: | cepr.org/active/publications/discussion_papers/dp.php?dpno=8139 |
Legal institutions are critical for the development of market-based economies. This paper defines legal institutions and discusses different indicators to measure their quality and efficiency. It surveys a large historical and empirical literature showing the importance of legal institutions in explaining cross-country variation in economic development. Finally, it presents and discusses three different views of why we can observe the large cross-country variation in legal institutions, the social conflict, the legal origin and the culture and religion hypotheses.