The effects of economic and political development on GDP growth volatility

The existing literature argues that both higher levels of political and economic development can dampen real GDP growth volatility. The problem, however, is that both forms of development are thought to be highly correlated. Using a dataset of 94 countries, we address this problem and find that not only does economic and political development have non-linear relationships with volatility, but that the effect of the former is more substantively significant than that of political development after a certain level of development is attained. © 2009 The Berkeley Electronic Press. All rights reserved.