Konkurencyjnosc instytucjonalna panstw OECD[Institutional competitiveness of the OECD countries]

Motivation: The paper attempts to investigate, whether or not institutional factors beyond those of solely economic nature can influence economic growth and income inequality in the OECD countries. Aim: The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of institutional infrastructure connected with the public sector, proxied for by a set of institutional variables: corruption, protection of property rights, environmental policy stringency and judicial independence, on socioeconomic success of the OECD countries’ societies. Materials and methods: The paper introduces two econometric models estimated on annual panel data from 2005 to 2012 for a homogenous group of nineteen high income OECD countries. Two variables — economic growth and income inequality — were used in order to operationalise the socioeconomic success. The econometric model of economic growth, based on an institutions-augmented Solow model with human capital, was estimated by OLS mtehod. As for the problem of income inequalities, a fixed-effects model has been employed, which, like the growth model, takes both institutional and control variables into account. Results: Results from the empirical analysis suggest that environmental policy stringency explains to a significant extent the variation in growth rates across nations. The only institutional variable being a significant source of differences in income inequality is protection of property rights. No significant effect of corruption on any of the explained variables was find, as well as judicial independence and protection of property rights on economic growth.