good morning and welcome good afternoon indeed and welcome to democracy and development we have the pleasure of having with us professor Thorstein persons there's no need to introduce professor person frankly or at least there wouldn't be in a meeting of academics but he is the director of the Institute for a national National Institute of academic studies and he has been the professor at the London School of Economics he is one of the founding fathers of political economics this is part of economic literature that has been developing very much over the past 10 or 15 years it's very interesting indeed as we will see today in addition to addressing the key question of economics ie what consumers do what households do what companies do it also focuses more on what policymakers do so this is a different perception a different standpoint to understand where countries are going he gave the major contribution to this particularly was with this book called political economics explaining economic policy which has been the type of political economics professor person in addition to contributing to the development of political economics has also been focusing on a number of other areas macroeconomics monetary policy as one he received a number of awards I mentioned just a few of them otherwise that would take us hours he is a member he has been president of the European Economic Association in 2003 and is member of the Nobel Prize for economics is one of the people that select the people to award the Nobel Prize he also received the award for the best younger economist and youngest means under fortify and that was in 1997 I want to give you an impression that Professor person comes from like the moon if you know I mean I also met him in a different situation in Cancun at the Latin American econometrics Society and I realized that he plays soccer excellently so I can today introduce to you the ibrahimovic of economics thank you for coming and thank you vengeance so for that very nice introduction it's the kind of thing you want your mother to hear and then she might even believe it so okay so before starting let me tell you that the research I'll be reporting on here today is almost exclusively joint work with an Italian economist cuídate Bellini who was earlier lecturing in this festival I guess we do is in the news these days because she has become director of Bocconi University but you should know that outside of Italy he's probably the most renowned economist alive and working today so you can blame guido for any errors that I say okay so my my topic is democracy and development and I think it's fair to say that the last 200 years have been exceptional at least from social science standpoint for mankind so these are the 200 years in which the world has seen economic growth take off in a number of countries unfortunately that hasn't happened everywhere so not every country is blessed with having sustained growth and where it happened it didn't really happen at the same time and when it happened it didn't always turn out to be sustainable path of growth so these heterogeneities in the experiences of countries means that today we observe really huge differences in living standards if we look across the globe you can say almost the same thing about political change so these two hundred years or the time in mankind where democracy as a governing system was introduced unfortunately that didn't happen in every country and when it happened it happened at different times and when it happened it didn't always happen in a consolidated way so some countries had to make return to other forms of a room and as a result today we observe huge differences in the Democratic experience that we have in various countries so there are some big questions why are some countries rich why are some countries poor why are some countries stable democracies others stable autocracies and others plagued by this kind of regime shifting political instability and of course each of these questions have been the topic of much research research made by economists by political scientists by economic and political historians over long time so my topic today is a little bit smaller than these big questions not much so I want to focus on the relation between the two you know we see economic change we see political change or the two related somehow in our gut in our stomach we feel that that ought to be the case that there is a positive connection between the two but you know can we say something more on the basis of science about this question so the the best thing then is to start by taking a look at the data and if you look at the data you see a pretty strong association between living standards today and democratic experience today so let me show you a graph that shows that relation for about 155 countries in the year 2000 so this picture as they say says more than a thousand words so let me try and explain what you see in front of you or if you want to look in your handout so this is living standards and democratic experience in 155 countries as we measure it in the year 2000 so each red docked in this diagram would be a country okay on the vertical axis going upwards you will see a measure of living standards which is just income per head in that economy in the year 2000 so each dot in that dimension the upward dimension reflects how much economic growth each country had in the past by large and when you look at the scale you should observe that this is like a logarithmic scale so from the the observation on the top to the right which is the u.s. to the observation to the left bottom that's about five steps and that translates into a difference of one hundred and fifty times so one hundred and fifty times richer is the u.s. than chart in the so this is simply mind-boggling and you see the differences there on the horizontal axis we plot simpler to understand measure this is Democratic experience measured simply as the number of years that the country has been in democracy since the Year 1800 okay as you see there's a great variation and as I mentioned as well and at least to me I think to you as well this graph shows the positive relation so you know on average richer countries have more Democratic experience but perhaps the most striking aspect of this graph is this tight triangular shape it looks like a triangle right and in particular it shows that having long democratic experience guarantees you it seems or its associated at least with high income whereas to have high income is not necessary to have long Democratic experience as you see on the left you know countries with very little the more democratic experience are both poor and rich so if you like the research that I'll talk about is trying to explain the forces behind that led up to this situation and what we can say about now if we think about the reasons for observing a positive relation then by pure logic there are three possibilities I guess so one is that democracy Foster's economic growth for example hundred democracy there are more stable and perhaps more favorable conditions for investment due to more better policies or more predictable policies and this gives more growth than average in other forms of government the other second possibility is that higher income fosters democracy so this could be for example that as people get richer they have a higher desire for freedom and non-material values as the living standards improve and that's a well-known theme it's actually an a label called modernization theory in in political science going back to say more Lipsett and Sydney verb and others in the 1960s that had this precisely this flavor the third possibility is that there's something else that explains both so you know the relation that we observed in that graph is simply spurious so historical circumstance luck or some colonial heritage promote sustained growth as well as stable democracy so we look and we see a relation that is really driven by something so over the last few decades historians economists and political scientists have offered all of these three explanations they have done it at different points in time they have done it with different degrees of force and they would say have backed up their their strong claims with different amounts of data so all in all I think it's still true that we know surprisingly little bit of this joint dynamics of economic and political political change but you know we have a clue that life is pretty complicated here so what's the right answer I think at the end of the day it would be a portion of all three so yes income fosters democracy some degree yes democracy Foster's growth to some degree and yes there are other factors that sort of help explain both but we need to get little further than that vague statement and a clue that to what that these things are not so simple you get from considering the histories of those hundred and fifty five countries in the paths leading up to the situation in today's situation in 2000 as I showed you in the graph and when you start considering those histories you see that there's not a single story here there's no the determinism because the relative timing of political regime changes and economic growth when it took off they differ quite a bit and so let me I'll try to lead you through a few examples just to drive home that point I should say that the the source is for for looking at these histories or to really fantastic datasets that have taken many many many years of work so for economic growth with the best most comprehensive data source is the database constructed by Angus Madison which he has worked on since the since the 80s and in that database you find data on annual income levels per head going back to 1824 for some some countries the other data source is for long term political data this is the so called quality dataset it is now a label for meaning it's the fourth wave in a sequence of studies this is a project that was started by Edgar who is now at an Ireland not Michigan before started in the 70s and basically gives data about political institutions in each year for all countries that are independent and has more than half a million inhabitants since the Year 1800 so both of these are very good data sources and I'm using them extensively so now let's look at a few examples so this is another type of plot for GDP and Democratic experience in the United Kingdom as we measure it so I'll be showing a few of these so let me explain how this graph too is constructed so you have on the horizontal axis you have time - you see we measure it from the Year 1800 until 2000 on the right scale right word scale we measured the same income as before so that's log of GDP per capita or log of in compact per head and the jagged blue curve shows the development of in England's income from 1820 when the data starts up to the year 2000 on the Left scale is the measure of Democratic experience ie the years of democracy since 1800 and so that's the red curve that you see underneath so if you begin with the economic events particularly if you look at spot wise data that are available before this time period you see that there seemed to be a kink in the 1830s or such that's the conventional dating of you know when long-term growth started in in Britain and from that year say 1830 1835 there is pretty steady growth all to this day yes there are some ups and downs small Wiggles on the curve you can see the Depression in the 1930s and and you can see the post-war repression as well but by and large this is sustained economic growth since eighteen the 1830s as for the red curve you know it starts at zero so zero years of democratic experience but then in 1837 was the something called the first Reform Act when the franchise was extended Parliament got more representative of the people that voted and in our definition of the democracy England became a democracy at that day and has never retreated since then so democratic experience just increases by one year for each subsequent year there's no dictatorship after this and in this case it looks as if you know economic growth and democratic experience start accumulating at the same time this is instead my own country Sweden where as you can see that the take-off was the beginning of sustained growth is a bit a little bit later so maybe around 1870 1875 this previously poor agrarian economy starts to industrialized and from then on it's sustained growth ever after our democratization is considerably later than than in the UK so in 1910 this is the breakthrough parliamentarism universal suffrage and so we code that to be the Stork of Swedish democracy but then there's no relapse and we build democratic experience and by now it's almost 100 years should show you Italy of course since we are here so this is from them the start of the Italian state in 1918 60s and as you can see they stand still in in economic growth initially then where you want to date Italian growth or income growth to start as a matter of taste I guess so around 1900 there are 20 years of improvement but then on the other hand there is 30 years of stagnation and you see the deep dip in the immediate post-war period and then for sure economic growth takes off in a sustained place right after the world and on the bottom it's democratic experience no democracy until the introduction of the Republic the birth of which we celebrate today and from there non democracy ever since so in this case you know either you say that democracy introduction of democracy and long term democratic experience coincides with economic growth take off or you say that they can of economic growth began a little earlier depending on how you want to see this so now here is a country with a little bit more of an eventful political history than those we have seen so far so this is Argentina so now you see that that the red curve with democratic experience has a lot of flats in fact in fact there are five flats on that curve right so this means that during this time since its inception in the late 1820s örjan Tina went through five periods of democracy and five periods of autocracy so it's a pretty stable period from 1880s to the 1930s when things are going well democracy is a weak democracy but regular elections to parties fighting over power and then you know the the trouble starts in the late 1930s that's the perineum and paramount period repeated coos and under military takeover and it's not until 1983 when the election of Al conferencing introduces democracy and we have had it again for the for the last 25 years you look at Argentine economic growth you see that the beginning looks pretty good and in fact around 1940 1945 before the war Argentina is one of the five richest countries in the world at that time then I think you can see that there is a slowdown during this period of political trouble and it's not clear that there's been a very sustained recovery yet so now Italy has sleep in Argentina has slipped so no longer among the FICA richest countries in the world rather like a third of the income level of say the US or such so in this case there is you know it's more troublesome but perhaps one can say that the period of instability and lots of political change coincides with the slowdown of economic growth here is another Latin American country to show you that all of Latin America is not you know political this is Costa Rica one of the oldest democracies in the world it's a little bit contested our criterion has Costa Rica being democratic from the 1840s others would say it's from the 1880s but still by any means is one of the the most the oldest democracies in the world and here the economic data doesn't start until 1950 sorry nineteen twenty or so but we see that the take off definitely doesn't happen until say nineteen fifty so maybe seventy or a hundred years after democracy was introduced so here it's income growth that is lagging democracy a couple of more examples so this is just to remind us of the other part of the globe so this is Uganda one of the countries that became independent after decolonization in the 1960s as you can see there are some flats there a couple of failed Democratic experiments in the 1960's and 1970's and it would be hard to say that Uganda has entered the era of of sustained economic growth in fact it's poor very poor still and if you just compare that level is about half the level of Sweden say in around 1820 when Sweden was a poor European country this craft is Singapore which remind us that not all countries that were became independent in the 1960s are doomed to failure on the contrary it is this spectacular boom of of economic growth so now Singapore is one of the richest countries in the world but unfortunately it never entered a democratic face still not a free country politically free country as you can see from the from the flat portion there and the last picture is of China which of course never entered democracy either there was actually a failed attempt there's a little bit blip on the graph in 1913 missus will comment I'm trying to shiro liberate introduce so it's half a year of free elections to democracy but then it's authority again and so not a democracy but spectacular economic growth at least in the last 35 years all right so what can we sort of learn from these histories about this main question you know the relation between economic and political change so that's the theme of the research and it involves theoretical as well as empirical research and exploits this rich data sources on on economic and political variation that I alluded to the medicine and the polity for data sets and you know these pictures these can be glimpses of history that you looked at should tell you already that any such credible research strategy must pay a close attention to differences across countries because it's not a universal experience that we have seen one must pay close attention to differences institutions differences in history differences in geography differences in culture and what what research tries to do is to try and make sense of you know can we say something systematic about the patterns in the data while paying attention keen attention to these differences across countries and I'll try to give you examples actually six examples of empirical results that we have found in this endeavor so the first result this with this question whether the introduction of the democracy promotes economic growth and a problem here is that once you start looking at the daytime you see that occurrence of reforms is not a random event so every country's not equally likely to either enter into a state of democracy or exit out of out of democracy and of course this can be problematic from the viewpoint of statistical measurement because if it's systematically the case that those countries enter democracy where democracy works well and those countries exit where democracy doesn't work so well then your inference will be biased by by this fact and you're not going to get the right conclusion so sometimes one wishes that you know experiments could be done so it would be great if we could do a medical field study here and you know make a thousand hypothetical countries swallow the pill of democracy just select them randomly and then the other thousand would swallow some other field which is not democracy and I will just compare what happens but of course this is not the world that we live in so we cannot kind of make such experiments so what one has to do instead is to be careful in the statistical methodology and what we try to do is to create a kind of statistical laboratory if you like I'm not going to go into technical details but essentially one wants to look at countries that are like twins they all have similar conditions so they are equally likely to enter into democracy at the given point in time some do some don't and if you compare across those countries then you're more likely to get the right answer then if you compare across everybody that's that research design in a very very simplified simplified way so anyway so what we find when when we do this and takes this heterogeneity seriously is that there is in fact a positive growth effect on average entering into democracy and the average effect is that after reform where democracy was introduced growth is about one percent higher than otherwise then we can also look at what happens of those that you know relapse go from democracy to autocracy have a turnaround in the political regime and here the average growth effect is negative on average about two percent per year if the growth rate lower once you relapse into autocracy but I should emphasize that this this growth effects are highly heterogeneous so you there's a significant dispersion around these means which with this out of the data that's one finding the second finding is you know looking at all reforms not being alike so it makes common sense that whether democracy has as a productive effect on economic growth probably depends a lot on what policies are being pursued and in particular what economic reforms are being perceived after the change for in connection with the change so in part of this work looks at large-scale economic reforms in the form of economic liberalisation actually there's some work by Francesco jab at sea and Cavallini that is also underlying what what we have done further here and what is what you find then is that having it a political liberalization that gives you 1% more growth as we saw on the previous line having an economic liberalization meaning opening up the economy to foreign trade and investment the capital flows gives about an equally large growth of that about 1% extra growth per year if the economy is liberalized so you'd think that if you do the two things together then you get two percent 1+1 but that turns out to be not really the case or at least when you dig a little bit deeper the sequence in which you liberalized it the political system and the economic system is very important so you can do it in two ways the economy before the quality or the quality before the economy and if you do economically liberal eyes the economic liberalisation before the political one then it's a huge effect it's not 2 percent is 3 and a half percent extra growth the other hand if you do the opposite so the democracies introduced before the economy is opened up then the effect is almost zero so if the 2 percent is the average of three and a half and zero or three and a half and a half or something like this but you know it matters a lot depending on how you do it and you know really world examples of countries that did did it or didn't do it with South Korea that liberalized the economy before the polity Philippines neighboring country to South Korea did the opposite Shaylee liberalized the economy before democracy was introduced Argentina did the opposite and I guess you know that South Korea and Chile belong to the success stories and the Philippines and Argentina are perhaps not such success stories another aspect in which democratic reforms are not the same is that you know what type of democracy you introduce obviously can matter as well okay so in this research we look at what type of democracy is being introduced you can introduce a democracy with the certain electoral system or another and there you can introduce a democracy which is a parliamentary democracy for a presidential democracy these are the two archetypes that we often talk about in in in this literature and I guess in in public discussions as well so if you look at the introduction of presidential versus parliamentary form of government of a democratic nature then you see immediately that the presidential democracy has a much stronger growth effect so the difference that you that you get on average in growth is one and a half percent higher if you introduce a presidential democracy rather than a parliamentary one so you may wonder why why that happens and there's some underlying theory that motivated us to to carry out this empirical work and that theory suggests that different political systems systematically choose different economic policies and the data should seem to support that hypothesis so if you look at for example at government spending after the introduction of democracy it's much bigger in parliamentary democracy than presidential democracy up to five percent of total income higher spending in parliamentary democracy after the reform in presidential democracy so if you think that the government is not always good for the economy then that's a possibility the other thing you can detect is that parliamentary democracy is much more likely to do the liberalization of the economy after the political reform rather than the other way around and as we saw in the previous slide that was not so conducive to to have better economic performance so there are some clues in in that paper the fourth result is another dimension of of growth of reforms namely some reforms come just by circumstances they come as a total surprise other reforms tend to become very expected so when Franco was ousted in 1975 you know every Spaniard knew that this was coming up and they had prepared for that event for for a long time whereas some third world leader dies in a random shooting and you know so happens that democracy gets introduced can come as a complete lightning from heaven so what difference does it make then simple theory tells you that people's anticipation is very important in particular is very important for their investment behavior okay so suppose people know that democracy is coming and that it will bring better results then of course that increases the expected return to investment and it makes people invest already before the reform because anticipation making themselves prepared for what is coming and this influences growth so which we try to to find if that is that idea is true in the data it's not so easy to do this because you know you must measure in this 200 year perspective what people's anticipation of whether there was going to be a reform or not and that's a difficult task but what would we try to do is to somehow from the data estimate the probability of reform taking place and then we assume that we as statisticians looking at the date are 200 years you know we know something but the people who live in the economy they know at least as much so we can use the measured likelihood of having the reform as a measure of expectations and when we do that we find an interesting result namely that if you are in in democracy and that probability of a coup or a relapse into autocracy goes down then growth accelerates so if people are more sure that the economy that the democracy is consolidated you see an effect on both investment and economic growth in autocracy you don't find any such effect of expectations so if democracy becomes more likely if anything there's a there's a negative effect so there's a nice symmetry here across democracies and autocracy two more items on the list this is the this is the famous modernization hypothesis does income make democracy more likely so here what we do is that we add as I said explain before we try to estimate the probability of seeing a change either a switch from Potok receipt to democracy or the other way around in a given year and then we relate how this probability is influenced by different political and economic factors and in particular income in this and here we again find it an asymmetry so the bond isolation hypothesis doesn't seem to hold water in in the data because there's no effect of incoming autocracies becoming richer doesn't make it any likely that democratic democratization happen but we do find in democracy a clear consolidation effect okay so if you're democratic then higher income progressively makes a coup that relapse it you make it relapse into autocracy less and less likely although this finding is perhaps a bit contested by by other researchers depends a little bit on how you measure democracy so the final result is this stuff about democratic experience that we looked at so what is the effect of having been a democracy for a long time of surviving as a democracy so compared to societies that are at similar income levels say but they have very different number of years of democratic history so say compare Costa Rica to Paraguay or another country with a more autocratic history then we find that that Democratic experience in the past is very important in the sense that if you're in democracy having had a lot of democracy in the past cuts the probability that you'll go into autocracy so it consolidates democracy today and in autocracy it does indeed raise the probability of exit so if you know Costa Rican and Paraguay would both go back to autocratic rule by some bad coincidence the prediction would be the Costa Rica the much bigger chance of returning faster than Paraguay had because of its much longer Democratic experience and it's easy to think that why this would happen in fact Cavallini and I who have done this work we have minted the concept of democratic capital to measure the fact that you're building up experience with democracy so people's values change over time when they see how democracy works and perhaps also the institutions are being built that will facilitate the return to democracy so people become more prepared to stand up and defend democracy if they have higher democratic capital meaning at the or democratic experience turns out you also see an effect of not only the history of democracy but the geography of democracies if you're surrounded by by many democracies you're more likely to consolidate your own that's the Ukraine effect if you like okay so this these were six glimpses of research results that I give you what do we make of these findings well first the qualification so all of these results are pretty recent and you know they I'm sure they're going to be scrutinized by many others and some will survive perhaps others won't but I think they're quite suggestive all these results suggest that heterogeneity is quite important so as I write on the slide all democratic reforms are not the same and even if you have the same reform it doesn't have the same effects in every time and in every place so it seemed very important to keep that in mind it's not a deterministic world it's you know multifaceted world so as they say in English the devil is in the details of what's going on but I guess we're making progress in understanding the devil a little bit and know what exactly difference in reforms do make a difference as I'm giving you a few examples of so we find some systematic patterns in the data now finally let's now return to this big puzzle that I post by showing you this this first first graph so recall the scatterplot that we began with so now if you think about findings number one and findings number five that was basically that the effect of autocracy on growth there is a lot and secondly that there is no effect of becoming richer on the probability of exiting from democracy so both nice these results tell you that you observe autocracies at all income that's right if the effect of a photo Christian growth there is a lot then you know we see after a while very different income levels coming up if it is the case that higher income becoming richer doesn't help you exit from autocracy then country state of autocratic even though their income go in different directions so that's to me you know the leftmost part of that graph where countries with very very limited democratic experience are found at all income that right so we see chart at the bottom we see Singapore at the top none other ever been a democracy but this is just evidence that democracy is not autocracy is not bad for every country in the world good in some instances of course we don't know how Singapore would have fared having been a democracy maybe even better but at least it's better than shot so so that's the way to interpret that pattern in the in the data now we had some other findings so I labeled them 1 2 3 they basically said that if you enter in democracy you have a positive growth effect on average if you enter in autocracy you have a negative growth effect on average but not all democratic reforms have the same effect it really matters right so this suggests that they should there should be a positive association between having been in democracy and your income level because you grow more than if you're not and the same thing with autocracy but the opposite sign okay so that perhaps helps explain the the middle portion of the graph where you see this positive slope where longer Democratic experience is associated with higher income levels but you know it's not I get the linear thing it's quite different for different countries now finally we have these findings that I labeled four to six which said that in a democracy both your income level if it gets higher and your Democratic experience if it gets higher helps consolidate democracy and then I also said that a more consolidated democracy makes expectations of a coup lower and this in turn has a positive effect on economic growth so in fact this is the optimistic note I think here that this suggests that you can have a virtuous circle know a country anthracene democracy perhaps by chance or just by historical coincidence and then it stays for a while okay this brings some economic growth the economy starts growing this in turn raises income which makes it less likely to relapse into autocracy so there's no relapse into autocracy for the sake of the argument so there is more democratic experience these two makes it less likely that you'll return to to autocracy and so you keep growing and then you know there's a positive feedback in both directions and eventually you consolidate your democracy and the high income level and perhaps this is what we see in the very rightmost part of the graph where no country with a long Democratic experience is anymore right so the final note I think these questions can be no doubt that they are important I think they are fascinating out of general curiosity and also as a researcher but they are difficult so I think we should be very humble how much we can learn and as I say there we are certainly not in the position to go to the World Bank and prescribe the blueprint for reform of country X in here why exactly what reforms should be pursued but you know we are accumulating some Somali about how political change and economic change interacts and I think this in particular this possibility of a virtuous circle is a reason to be optimistic in troubled rate regions we can have joint economic and political progress when conditions are right perhaps in Africa you know we have Botswana we have more issues that have been Democratic for 40 years and there are by now middle-income countries in the continent that is otherwise plagued by all sorts of problems so I stopped on that optimistic note gracias thank you very much professor person for your very interesting lecture which gave us note of optimism in accordance with this data we are a young democracy so if we continue to be democratic we may have more chances to grow economically now I think there is time for some questions you can make questions in Italian or in English as you please could we have a microphone please thank you you're making in Italian or in English in Italian okay I'd like to ask you how people should act in those countries where we want to export democracy what is your perception what can be your suggestions apart from the indications given by international organizations what is your personal opinion you know international organizations have indeed insisted a lot on democratic reform in the last 10 to 15 years so before you never heard the World Bank or the IMF talk about democratic reforms but now they do it and I'm not sure that the result is everywhere fantastic I think it's important to understand that democracy is not only about having elections there has been there's a superficial form of democracy where you only have elections and you know perhaps the elections are rigged and perhaps you know the result of the elections are not being respected so in fact the measure that we are using in in this in this study to define democracy has more than free and reasonably fair elections it are also things like you know from how wide a segment of the population is all the candidates taken so is there open entry in politics what constraints are there on a ruling government once it has been installed so I think it's important if you want to make recommendations of democracies you know you don't only look at the fact that you have a ballot but you need to have a framework that makes political life civilized in these other dimensions as well so I think that would be the my personal opinion since of your area private could you tell us what are the countries on the top right of your graph yeah I should have had the one of this way you mark the countries but I think so the the one on the very top that's the United States so it's according to our measure Democratic from 1800 and onwards and it has the highest income then you have United Kingdom the next one down and below United Kingdom you have this Costa Rica so that's it's not rich compared to England but it's rich compared to to the rest of Latin America then my guess is that the next two would be Switzerland Denmark and then I'm not really sure some other European nations such as the Netherlands probably unban Geum and what we can the question is in English in your shape is that maybe economic growth bring democracy or democracy brings economic role but it seems no hope of democracy in nation a poor nation is it true it is but this is the city this is the situation now you know so this is in a spotlight in a given year and then of course many of these poor nations or new nations so they didn't have much time yeah democratic reforms of sorts have taken part in taking place in in poor parts of the world in Africa in particular you know there are these long-standing democracies such as I mentioned Mauritius Botswana South Africa came next and you know in the 1990s you have other places like been in Ivory Coast others became more democratic so it's a little bit early to tell because you know they are you know have a few years of democratic experience and we don't really know what happens to their economies perhaps it takes a while for the for the traces to be to be seen in fact you can look at other things other outcome variables are not only economics so you can look at health and there's there's some work by TMS Li and masayuki khuda Matsu that suggests that having democratic experience also helps to bring better health to the population so mortality is going down and once you have a democratic reform you know infant mortality dive sometimes pretty quickly and perhaps we see those results of other aspects of societal life quicker than we see you know catching up with with Europe which is obviously a process that will take many many decades any other questions well if there are no other questions from the floor I would take the opportunity of putting a question myself I mean I'm sure that there could be different ways of looking into this box of a talk and to see whether or not they're different type of regime actually bring different yeah that's that's also a very good question so you know it's a democracy for all its faults is a most often a rules-based system so you know there will be some rules they would be followed more or less and you know we can talk about different forms of democracy because we believe that the electoral system is meaningful that this distinction with the presidential parliamentary is meaningful but then if we only contrast that with the autocracy we're contrasting that with everything else and obviously autocracies are very very different military autocracies there are other types and I don't think we have a good clue about that and the reason we don't have a clue is that measurement is hard because these aren't known rules based systems so what you expect then is that you know things like personalities the leadership in itself you know is it a good leader or is it a bad leader that will matter all the more and my guess is that we could get somewhere by looking into how leadership changes in autocracy so the question is whether you know there is there is some accountability of the leader to the to the people my guess is that well-functioning autocracies even though they don't have popular elections at least have a feedback process where a useless leader is being moved to the side and a better person comes in it's one of the great virtues of democracy is that it's a selection mechanism often people think about democracy as being just about you know representing people's interest but it's also a civilized way of moving to the side a leader that is not putting in the effort that they should or that is not right for the for the task at hand and this is often forgotten that's the accountability part of democracy and so my guess is that those autocracies at work they have a kind of accountability mechanism through which have a group that is making the selection of the leader effectively so I think that's where one should start to study thank you very much professor person and if there aren't other questions I think we can close this session