POLITICAL-ECONOMY, GROWTH AND CONVERGENCE IN LESS-DEVELOPED-COUNTRIES

This paper examines the roles of political and cultural factors in the growth of less-developed countries. We begin by formulating a growth model, similar to that of Baumol-Wolff (1988), based on the revised Su mmers-Heston (1988) data set. We build upon this base model, using a p riori information, to obtain further models which are capable of expla ining growth in terms of politics and culture. We find that liberal re gimes and Asian countries appear to have potentially high growth rates of real GDP per capita.