IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/wbk/wbrwps/5108.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

How do local-level legal institutions promote development ?

Author

Listed:
  • Gauri, Varun

Abstract

This paper develops a framework and some hypotheses regarding the impact of local-level, informal legal institutions on three economic outcomes: aggregate growth, inequality, and human capabilities. It presents a set of stylized differences between formal and informal legal justice systems, identifies the pathways through which formal systems promote economic outcomes, reflects on what the stylized differences mean for the potential impact of informal legal institutions on economic outcomes, and looks at extant case studies to examine the plausibility of the arguments presented. The paper concludes that local-level, informal legal institutions can support social substitutes for the enforcement of contracts, although these substitutes tend to be limited in range and scale; they are flexible and could conceivably be adapted to serve the interests of the poor and marginalized if supportive organizational and social resources could be brought to support the legal claims of the disempowered; and they are more likely to support personal integrity rights than the positive liberties that are also constitutive of development as freedom.

Suggested Citation

  • Gauri, Varun, 2009. "How do local-level legal institutions promote development ?," Policy Research Working Paper Series 5108, The World Bank.
    • Handle: RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:5108
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/WDSContentServer/WDSP/IB/2009/11/03/000158349_20091103102211/Rendered/PDF/WPS5108.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Musharraf Cyan & Michael Price & Mark Rider, 2017. "Building Trust in State through Legal Literacy: An RCT in the Tribal Areas & Frontier Regions of Pakistan," International Center for Public Policy Working Paper Series, at AYSPS, GSU paper1712, International Center for Public Policy, Andrew Young School of Policy Studies, Georgia State University.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Legal Products; Children and Youth; Public Institution Analysis&Assessment; Gender and Law; Legal Institutions of the Market Economy;
    All these keywords.

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:5108. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Roula I. Yazigi (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/dvewbus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.