Constitutional Environments and Economic Growth (Princeton Legacy Library) - Hardcover

Scully, Gerald W.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0691042616 ISBN 13: 9780691042619

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 1992

Synopsis

In this provocative work, Gerald Scully develops and empirically tests a theory about how a nation's constitutional setting affects its economic growth. Modern growth theory links the rise in the standard of living to capital formation, both physical and human, and to technological progress, and development economists continue to believe that the transformation of the less developed world cannot occur without massive government control of the economy. Scully, on the other hand, maintains that material advancement is as much affected by the choice of the economic, legal, and political institutions under which people live and work as it is by resource endowment and technological progress. Nothing in the neoclassical theory of growth considers the "rules of the game" under which capital is accumulated and innovation is made. Redressing this neglect, Scully proposes ways of measuring the economic, civil, and political freedom within a society's institutional framework, and he reveals that freedom, or the lack thereof, powerfully and demonstrably influences not only economic progress but also income distribution. Politically open societies grow at nearly three times the rate of those where freedom is more circumscribed, and they also have a more equitable distribution of income. Finally, Scully measures the effect of the size of the state on economic progress, showing that the larger the amount of government expenditures out of gross domestic product, the lower the rate of economic progress.

Originally published in 1992.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

About this title

About the Author

Gerald W. Scully is Professor of Economics in the School of Management at the University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, USA. In 1996 he was Visiting Professor at the Inland Revenue Department, Wellington, New Zealand. Patrick James Caragata received his PhD in political economy from the University of Toronto in 1981. In June 1988 he moved to New Zealand and became chief economist at the Ministry of Energy where he redesigned the royalty regime for petroleum. His book Resource Pricing: Rent Recovery Options for New Zealand's Energy and Mineral Industries (1989) is now used as a standard reference tool for designing resource royalties in Asia and Latin America. In 1991 he became chief tax policy adviser with Inland Revenue in New Zealand. He redesigned the petroleum mining taxation regime in 1991, and worked extensively on international tax issues for several years. In 1994 he initiated the work to monitor the Health of the Tax System. As special adviser taxation economics he led the production of 37 working papers and the Report on the Health of the Tax System in September 1997. In October 1997 Dr. Caragata was appointed managing director of McCallum Petterson Financial Diagnostics Ltd. in Wellington. In 1998 he edited The Economic and Compliance Consequences of Taxation: A Report on the Health of the Tax System in New Zealand, also published by Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Review

"Scully insists that the 'rules of the game' under which capital accumulates, technology advances, and incomes are distributed, are determined primarily by social, political, and legal institutions.... His statistical data reveal that market-oriented, politically open economies grew almost three times faster, had more equitable distribution of income, and were two and one-half times more efficient in transforming their inputs into national output than their centrally controlled command counterparts." (Choice)

Edition details

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 1992
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0691042616
• ISBN 13: 9780691042619
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 268