TY  - JOUR
AU  - Porta,Rafael La
AU  - Lopez-de-Silanes,Florencio
AU  - Shleifer,Andrei
AU  - Vishny,Robert
TI  - The Quality of Goverment
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 6727
PY  - 1998
Y2  - September 1998
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w6727
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w6727.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Rafael La Porta
Dartmouth College
Tuck School
210 Tuck Hall
Hanover, NH  03755
Tel: 603/646-3739
E-Mail: rafael.laporta@dartmouth.edu

Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes
EDHEC Business School
393, Promenade des Anglais BP 3116
06202 Nice Cedex 3
France
Tel: +33 (0) 4 93 18 78 07
Fax: +33 (0) 4 93 18 78 41
E-Mail: Florencio.lopezdesilanes@edhec.edu

Andrei Shleifer
Department of Economics
Harvard University
Littauer Center M-9
Cambridge, MA 02138
Tel: 617/495-5046
Fax: 617/496-1708
E-Mail: ashleifer@harvard.edu

Robert W. Vishny
Booth School of Business
The University of Chicago
5807 South Woodlawn Avenue
Chicago, IL  60637
Tel: 773/702-2522
Fax: 773/834-1920
E-Mail: Rvishny@gmail.com
AB  - We investigate empirically the determinants of the quality of governments in a large cross-section of countries.  We assess government performance using measures of government intervention, public sector efficiency, public good provision, size of government, and political freedom.  We find that countries that are poor, close to the equator, ethnolinguistically heterogeneous, use French of socialist laws, or have high proportions of Catholics or Muslims exhibit inferior government performance.  We also find that the larger governments tend to be the better performing ones.  The importance of historical factors in explaining the variation in government performance across countries sheds light on the economic, political, and cultural theories of institutions.
ER  -