The Divergent Post-Communist Paths to Democracy

Download or read book The Divergent Post-Communist Paths to Democracy written by Simeon Djankov and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 44 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We show that the economic transition has been more successful than the political transformation in the quarter century since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The adoption of strong parliamentarian systems has negated the deleterious effects of religious and imperial history on economic evolution. As a result, the divergence in democracy and political rights is 4 to 5 times larger than the divergence in the path towards economic freedom and ease of doing business. Democracy is not harder to predict than economic freedom -- history and ethnicity predict it well. But recent authoritarian regressions in Hungary and Poland, countries with successful economic reforms and strong parliamentarian systems, present a new challenge to researchers.