Impact of leadership on a country’s economic growth

Since a long period of human history, little attention has been paid to how the quality of leadership could affect the economic growth of a nation. In countries with strong administrations, this effect was very small because leadership has been thought of as the ability to make people follow the rules that already exist. In addition, most researchers focused on political leadership, which narrows the definition of leadership. Furthermore, most growth theories do not appoint leadership or the quality of the people at the head of the nation as an asset to economic growth. Among the main factors mentioned for making growth happen are infrastructure, education, health, access to water and electricity, and technological development. It was not until Jones and Olken published their article on the possible link between leadership and economic growth. In fact, leadership matters as far as economic growth is concerned, resulting from the impact of decisions and policies and their sustainability over time. All in all, this paper is a comparative analysis of the economic growth experiences of countries and the leadership aspects that sustain them. We conclude that countries with strong and quality leaders have successfully achieved their objectives in terms of growth, which is not the case with those being led by weak leadership.