Comment

Abstract

The question of how political factors affect economic performance has been receiving increasing attention. This development is in part because of the renewed interest in growth and a revitalized discussion on its determinants. Puzzled by the large and persistent differences in economic performance across countries, economists started to search again for factors to explain these differences. Political factors seemed an obvious candidate. There is now a body of literature investigating the relation between political factors and growth across countries and the Costa Rica conference presented a suitable opportunity to review this new empirical literature. What has the new empirical literature revealed in terms of which and how political factors matter? What do we know? What don’t we know?¹