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Fascinating.
thematically related:
http://www.businessweek.com/articles...ate-jobs#r=rssWhen it comes to economic policy, leaders (should) all know a little bit better now to avoid really silly policies like dramatically cutting budgets in a recession or overmanipulating exchange rates, but the link between faster gross domestic product growth and most policy choices remains tenuous. Ricardo Hausmann, Lant Pritchett, and Dani Rodrik of Harvard University studied sustained economic growth accelerations around the world since the 1950s and suggest that only about 14 percent were associated with policy liberalization, for example (leaving 86 percent of high growth periods that aren’t).
It’s not just that the link between growth and particular policies is weak—so is the link between growth and politicians as a whole, whatever their ideological persuasion. Bill Easterly and Steven Pennings of New York University looked for (PDF) evidence of the impact of national leaders on growth since 1960. Their findings suggest that, if national leaders matter anywhere, it’s in autocracies rather than in democracies like the U.S. and Europe. But even in autocratic regimes it’s hard to pinpoint the influence of individual leaders on economic growth—good or bad. Some leaders were in charge during periods of high growth and some during periods of low growth, but no more often than you would expect if random chance rather than leadership quality was driving the results. Across 50 years and 100 countries, they suggest, 2 percent of the variation in growth rates might be explained by political leaders—with 98 percent accounted for by other factors.
Fascinating.
Again, sounds "credible", but between the lines, the real message, it's a BUSINESSweek anti-government opinion piece.
half a century and more than 100 countries were covered in the study. maybe the impact of ideology on economics is overstated.
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