Does Media Stimulate Reform Efforts?
This paper investigates to what extent media impacts political decisions. A viable practical approach to test the relationship between mass media and political actions is through the use of the World Bank’s Doing Business data, specifically, by ass...
| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Working Paper |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2019
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/156301565975855947/Does-Media-Stimulate-Reform-Efforts http://hdl.handle.net/10986/32296 |
| Summary: | This paper investigates to what extent
media impacts political decisions. A viable practical
approach to test the relationship between mass media and
political actions is through the use of the World Bank’s
Doing Business data, specifically, by assessing local media
coverage of Doing Business and implementation of business
regulatory reforms. The tested hypothesis is that countries
with higher media coverage of Doing Business tend to carry
out more business regulatory reforms, assuming one- and
two-year lags between media coverage and reform
implementation. To achieve this objective, the study put
together a comprehensive data set that encompasses
country-specific local media coverage of the Doing Business
report in 190 economies. The study finds that local media
coverage of Doing Business has a significant influence on
regulators’ actions. First, the analysis shows that the
number of local media articles tends to increase the
probability of whether a country does any reform. Second,
countries with greater media coverage of Doing Business
indicators tend to have higher numbers of implemented reforms. |
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