The Agricultural and the Democratic Transitions Causality and the Roundup Model
Univ. Of Aarhus Dept. of Economics Working Paper No. 2009-6
22 Pages Posted: 1 Jun 2009
Date Written: May 19, 2009
Abstract
Long-run development (in income) causes a large fall in the share of agriculture commonly known as the agricultural transition. We confirm that this conventional wisdom is strongly supported by the data. Long-run development (in income) also causes a large increase in democracy known as the democratic transition. Elsewhere we have shown that it is almost as strong as the agricultural transition. Recently, a method has been presented to weed out spuriousness. It makes the democratic transition go away by turning income insignificant, when it is supplemented by a set of formal controls. We show that the same method makes the agricultural transition go away as well. Hence, it seems to be a method that kills far too much, as suggested by the subtitle. This suggestion leads to a discussion of the very meaning of long-run causality.
Keywords: Long-run growth, transitions, causality and spuriousness
JEL Classification: O1, P5, Q1
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
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