Development Performance and the Institutions of Governance: Evidence from East Asia and Latin America

Summary. — The purpose of this paper is three-fold: to assess the extent to which the institutional characteristics of governance can be captured with available data, to evaluate the ability of such measures to explain development performance across re-gions, countries and time, and to examine the extent to which dierent governance characteristics are complements (rather than substitutes) to one another. Using the four operational governance characteristics, we find that, first, in the full sample, all gov-ernance characteristics have the expected eects on development performance and, second, both the relative importance of these characteristics and the degree of com