The role of constitutions on poverty: A cross-national investigation

Abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. www.econstor.eu Terms of use: Documents in D I S C U S S I O N P A P E R S E R I E S ABSTRACTThe Role of Constitutions on Poverty: A Cross-National Investigation *In this paper we use novel historical data on economics and social rights from the constitutions of 201 countries and an instrument variable strategy to answer two important questions. First, do economic and social rights provisions in constitutions reduce poverty? Second, does the strength of constitutional language of the economic and social rights matter? Constitutional provisions can be framed either more weakly as directive principles or more strongly as enforceable law. We find three important results. First, we do not find an association between constitutional rights generally framed and poverty. Second, we do not find an association between economic and social rights framed as directive principles and poverty. Third, we do find a strong negative association between economic and social rights framed as enforceable law and poverty. When we use legal origins as our IV, we find evidence that this result is causal. Our results survive a variety of robustness checks. The policy implication is that constitutional provisions framed as enforceable law provide effective meta-rules with incentives for policymakers to initiate, fund, monitor and enforce poverty reduction policies.JEL Classification: I24, I32, I38, O1, O38

Portrayal of sustainability principles in the mission statements and on home pages of the world's largest organizations

“…Nevertheless, the broad awareness of sustainability among resource extractors we found is consistent with the creation of several voluntary collaborative agreements to reduce the impact of resource extraction on the environment (e.g., Alliance for Responsible Mining ; Initiative for Responsible Mining Assurance ). This change may also reflect a need for a social license to operate (Gunningham et al.…”

“…For instance, national environmental quality is directly related to the strength of a country's constitutional commitment (Jeffords & Minkler 2014). Similarly, the strength of constitutional language related to poverty alleviation is correlated with the effectiveness of national policies (Minkler & Prakash 2015).…”

Institutions Do Not Rule: Reassessing the Driving Forces of Economic Development

“…2013). The result is also consistent with some newly-documented facts such as the lack of robust negative relationship between constitutional rights and the poverty level (Minkler and Prakash, 2015).…”

“…More recently, Minkler and Prakash (2015) provide empirical measures of constitutional rights and use them to study whether constitutional rights or constitutional provisions are significant in explaining poverty levels or reducing poverty in developing countries. The conjecture is that stronger constitutional rights (-such as enforceable law with respect to human rights, and the right to an adequate standard of living, to health/medical care, to adequate housing, to primary education, to work, to public employment, just and favorable remuneration, and to social security in the event of unemployment and disability sickness-) would result in lower poverty levels, according to the institutional theory.…”

Do Constitutions Matter? The Effects of Constitutional Environmental Rights Provisions on Environmental Outcomes

“…The authors find that political, property, civil and emancipatory rights are positive associates of economic outcome. Finally, Minkler and Prakash (2015) use an instrumental variables cross-section framework to show that economic and social human rights in constitutions, when framed as enforceable law, cause reduced poverty when measured by the World Bank's $2/day headcount indicator. (2012, pp.…”