Civil Liberties, Democracy, and the Performance of Government Projects

by J. Isham, D. Kaufmann, and L. Pritchett (in the World Bank Economic Review 11:2) (2000) • Synthesis; also available in Arabic, Chinese, French, German, and Spanish

Using data from the World Bank's Operations Evaluation Department, the authors examine the link between the performance of Bank-related projects and various indicators of country governance. They find that: there is a strong statistical—and possibly causal—link between civil liberties and project performance; and the type of political regime (whether authoritarian or democratic) and the status of more purely political liberties do not appear to significantly alter project performance.