The Relationship between Democracy and Economic Growth in Tunisia: An Application of Autoregressive Distributed Lag Model

Abstract

This paper aims to identify the nature of the relationship between democracy and economic growth. We will answer the question: Does democracy improve economic growth? We study the case of Tunisia during the period from 1980 until 2014; this country has experienced a democratic transition after the revolution of 14 ^th January 2011. Our study is divided into two parts. The first part is a literature review of overview on the causality between democracy and economic growth. The second part as an application uses the Autoregressive Distributed Lag Model (ARDL). The choice of the technical SARL aimed the study of the existence of a long-run equilibrium relationship between two variables in level, a procedure co-integration has been proposed by Pesaran et al (2001). The results of different empirical studies were inconclusive. Some generated a negative impact of democracy on growth while others showed the opposite. The empirical results of our work have shown that in a nascent democracy such is the case of Tunisia; democracy has no effect on economic growth in the short term.  It is to add an observation rate of GDP during the period post -revolution generated a sawtooth trend which demonstrates the unstable economic situation in the country.