Abstract

Thanks to globalization, some countries achieve economic growth despite underdeveloped institutions, raising the issue of whether institutions or other factors might contribute more to economic growth. With settler mortality during colonization as an IV for current institutions of former colonies, Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson found a tremendous, positive effect of institutions on economic performance. We argue that their study ignored an important factor, i.e. globalization, which may both relate to colonial history and affect current economic development, thus potentially biasing the estimate of the impact of institutions. This is because colonial history by English-speaking countries may affect a country’s English proficiency, which in turn may affect its economic globalization and social globalization and thus its economic development, with the United Kingdom and the United States as the world leader in succession. Correspondingly, we add globalization and examine the concomitant effects of globalization and institution on economic performance. With settler mortality and length of colonization by English-speaking countries as instrument variables, we find that globalization contributes greatly to economic performance and the effect of institutions becomes not statistically significant once globalization is taken into account. Of the sub-indices of globalization, the index of social globalization has the strongest and most stable impact on economic performance. Specifically, a one-point increase in overall globalization of a country or region corresponds to about 9.8% increase in its GDP per capita; and a one-point increase in social globalization corresponds to about 7.3% increase in GDP per capita.

摘要

由于全球化，一些国家在制度不发达的情况下实现了经济增长，引发了制度或其他因素是否对经济增长贡献更大的问题。将殖民期间的定居者死亡率作为前殖民地当前机构的 IV，Acemoglu、Johnson 和 Robinson 发现机构对经济表现的巨大积极影响。我们认为，他们的研究忽略了一个重要因素，即全球化，它可能既与殖民历史有关，又影响当前的经济发展，从而可能使对制度影响的估计产生偏差。这是因为英语国家的殖民历史可能会影响一个国家的英语水平，进而影响其经济全球化和社会全球化，进而影响其经济发展，与英国和美国相继成为世界领先者。相应地，我们加入了全球化，并考察了全球化和制度对经济绩效的伴随影响。以定居者死亡率和英语国家的殖民时间作为工具变量，我们发现全球化对经济绩效的贡献很大，一旦考虑到全球化，制度的影响在统计上变得不显着。在全球化的子指数中，社会全球化指数对经济表现的影响力最强、最稳定。具体而言，一个国家或地区的整体全球化水平提高1个百分点，相当于其人均GDP增长约9.8%；社会全球化增加 1 个点对应于 7 个左右。