This article studies the effect of political regime type on economic growth in sub-Saharan Africa. Democracy promotes growth because it conditions government consumption so that consumption is used for public purposes rather than private needs and this in turn leads to faster growth. By conditioning consumption towards public goods and away from private goods, we should see that consumption in democratic regimes is associated with more public goods like roads and education while in authoritarian regimes consumption yields less of these goods. Likewise, consumption should be associated with falling fertility in democratic regimes and rising fertility in authoritarian regimes. Using several measures of growth, the empirical estimates from a large-n fixed-effects regression show that democracy conditions consumption so that the latter is associated with faster growth. Moreover, the empirical analysis indicates that government consumption in democratic regimes is associated with more education completion and lower fertility rates.

中文翻译：

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撒哈拉以南非洲的民主、消费和增长

本文研究了政治体制类型对撒哈拉以南非洲经济增长的影响。民主促进增长，因为它调节政府消费，使消费用于公共目的而不是私人需要，这反过来又会导致更快的增长。通过将消费限制为公共物品而不是私人物品，我们应该看到民主政体中的消费与道路和教育等更多公共物品相关，而在专制政体中，消费产生的这些物品较少。同样，消费应该与民主政权中的生育率下降和专制政权中的生育率上升有关。使用多种增长指标，大 n 固定效应回归的经验估计表明，民主制约着消费，因此后者与更快的增长相关。此外，实证分析表明，民主政体中的政府消费与更多的教育完成率和更低的生育率相关。