eThesis - School of Business electronic theses

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Since the industrial revolution, development has been at the center of politics and politics at the center of development. Whether democratic type of government or autocratic perform better has been discussed among economists and political scientists alike for years. The emergence of autocratic governments in South East Asia as champions in bringing fast growth has fueled the debate even more. Many dictatorships have made the success of these countries as a tool to question the attributes of democracy and in return legitimize their grip. Even though, democracy has its own merit irrespective of whether it brings fast growth or not, it is still a worthy cause to learn about its effectiveness more. Development and poverty alleviation have been the allure to my choice in studying Economics and my motivation to pursue my thesis in a subject that has been always closer to my heart. There is no consensus among economists, policy makers and political scientists as to how democratic properties of a regime in a country can bring a fast economic growth. But before the how, what is even democracy begs an answer. In my thesis I have tried to dig in to these broad conversation of definition of democracy. I discussed the concept of democracy the channels of growth that it can affect and then forwarded the empirical findings and arguments in the literature. Moreover, I have used in my empirical analysis fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA), a rather fresh method of understanding causality and finding various paths to arrive at an outcome rather than solitary way propagated by other conventional methods. I included as many countries as possible so that many consistent paths of arriving at the outcome of development can be identified. The findings of my thesis indicate that one country can have a combination of different conditions in distinction to others, and achieve development.