1- Faculty Member of Allameh Tabatabaee University
2- PhD Candidate of Allameh Tabatabaee University , mohammadiahm@gmail.com
Abstract: (7547 Views)
Growing literature of economic growth and development shows that government abilities to raise revenue from taxes or fiscal capacity is a fundamental cause of the economic development. In this paper, we use differences in historical external wars to estimate the effect of fiscal capacity on income per capita. Historical and economic literature shows that countries not only have different experiences of historical external wars but also in order to wage those wars they had invested in their fiscal capacity. Exploiting differences in the share of days from 1816 to 1900 that a country was involved in an external military conflict as an instrument for fiscal capacity, we estimate large effects of fiscal capacity on income per capita. The results are robust to the inclusion of controls for the geography, democracy, openness, legal origins, religion, fractionalization, outliers, different instruments for fiscal capacity, and different indexes for fiscal capacity.
Type of Study:
Research |
Received: 2012/05/6 | Accepted: 2012/06/13 | Published: 2014/03/8