Institutional quality and poverty measures in a cross-section of countries

We provide cross-country empirical evidence on the link between measures of institutional development and of poverty over the period 1960-1990. We find that the more efficient the institutions, the lower the degree, severity, and incidence of poverty. We provide both ordinary least squares and two-stages least squares estimates, and show that our results are robust for an overall measure of institutional development as well as for an index of risk of expropriation and quality of the bureaucracy. Copyright Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2000