Authoritarian Regimes and Public Good Provision; Some Empirics
Author: Sarwar Khan

Political regimes or political institutions matter for public good provision both across countries and within a particular country. That is, some regimes are more efficient in the provision of public good and a transition to such political regime can increase the level of public good provision. For instance, Authoritarian regimes as a subset of formal political institutions vigorously lack the fundamentals and requisites for the economic and political development. The distribution of political power is not even in authoritarian regimes, produces an uncompetitive political market where both exit and entry costs are high, and provides diverse set of strategies for political support. To facilitate this analysis researcher has investigated empirically the hypothesis that; for political support, leaders in authoritarian regimes due to relatively uneven distribution of political power in the society rely on targeted transfers to a powerful group, therefore, provide meager amount of public goods to entire society. Studies results which are based on panel setting substantiate the hypothesis that authoritarian regimes under provide public goods both at a given time and over time. Indicators of public good such as gross secondary school enrolment rate, safely managed drinking water services, and ease of doing business are negatively related with our indicators of political regime such as polity index score both across sections and overtime. Study results obtained from three separate regression set conclude that public goods such as gross secondary school enrolment rate, safely managed drinking water services, and ease of doing business are under provided in authoritarian regimes. Consequently, a complete transition from authoritarian regimes to democratic regimes will increase the provision of public goods in the society. Supervisor:- Dr. Karim Khan

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Keywords : Authoritarian regime, Democratic regime, Ease of doing business, Political Regime, Polity index score, Public good provision, Safely managed drinking water service, Secondary School Enrolment Rate
Supervisor: Karim Khan

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