Leader Value Added : Assessing the Growth Contribution of Individual National Leaders
Previous literature suggests that leaders matter for growth in general. This paper asks which leaders matter and develops a methodology to estimate the growth contribution of individual leaders and calculate its precision. The findings show that few leaders have statistically significant contrib...
| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Working Paper |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2020
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/787101587041484119/Leader-Value-Added-Assessing-the-Growth-Contribution-of-Individual-National-Leaders http://hdl.handle.net/10986/33609 |
| Summary: | Previous literature suggests that leaders matter for growth
in general. This paper asks which leaders matter and develops
a methodology to estimate the growth contribution of
individual leaders and calculate its precision. The findings
show that few leaders have statistically significant contributions;
it is difficult to know who is good for growth and
who is not. The paper also finds that the most intuitive
estimate of a leader’s contribution—the average growth rate
during tenure—is largely useless for measuring his or her
true contribution. Consequently, many leaders with statistically
significant growth effects are surprises. Moreover,
leaders in non-democratic countries are no more likely to
be statistically significant than leaders in democratic ones. |
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