Paper:ewp-le/0212001 From: Date: Tue, 17 Dec 2002 17:24:36 -0600
This paper examines the empirical relationship between the quality of the Indian judiciary and the economic development of the Indian States and Union Territories. It evaluates this causality by analysing the development of the state-level per capita income and poverty rates. I define the quality of the judiciary in terms of: (i) its speed in deciding trials; and, (ii) the predictability of the trial outcome. I measure speed by the backlog in High Courts and predictability through the rate of allowed appeals to the Supreme Court from the High Court. The methodology applied is a cross-regional time-series regression that simultaneously estimates the endogenous relationship between the quality of the judiciary and productive factors, such as agricultural production, private sector development, capital formation, poverty rates, public security and infrastructure. These productive factors in turn influence the level of per capita income, which I model as a function of the size of the agricultural and private services sector, the poverty rate, the transportation infrastructure density, the rental income of land, the fixed capital formation in the industrial sector, the development of the credit markets, the literature rates, and the public safety. The data indicate that a weak judiciary has a negative effect on economic and social development, which leads to: (i) lower per capita income; (ii) higher poverty rates; (iii) lower private economic activity, (iv) poorer public infrastructure; and, (v) higher crime rates and more industrial riots. The results are robust and the correlations are strong and negative. In addition, through a forecasting simulation I have shown that an increase in predictability and a speedier judiciary substantially increase the per capita income growth rate.
archive:
0212001.pdf
is 2225837 bytes, 1-19-103,
or 0212001.pdf.gz
EconWPA began as a conversation between Bob Parks and Larry Blume on January 28, 1993. I located Paul Ginsparg's archive (then xxx.lanl.gov) and he graciously installed his software on a Sun Sparc system which was supporting the department of economics email and computation. EconWPA began accepting papers July 1, 1993 and had ftp, email, gopher and web interfaces. The web interface for submissions was engineered into existence in July 1995. A complete and catastrophic machine failure in 1999 caused the loss of EconWPA's email new paper announcment service at which time there were over 15,000 subscriptions with over 8,000 unique email addresses.
I was told that I could keep operating EconWPA (as well as many other services including rfe.wustl.edu, barnett.wustl.edu, and three RePEc servers) but I would receive no support (hardware, software, or anthing else) and (as had been the case) no compensation. At that point, given the apparent low valuation of my activities by the department, and university, it made no sense for me to continue operating EconWPA or other services.
Thanks to all who have supported EconWPA in the past.
A Chinese curse states May you live in intersting times. I have. Bob Parks - Jan 2006