Bitcoin Annotated Bibliography

Regime Types, Government Spending on Public Goods, and Poverty Deduction

In today’s world, poverty is a very serious problem for most countries. Poor people are suffering from low income, hunger, and illness. What’s more, poor people always lack access to the basic healthcare and education, which then reinforce their poor situation. Economists and sociologists have already done a lot of research on explaining the causes of poverty and the methods to overcome poverty. However, do regime types make effects on poverty? Much current research pays strong attentions to the particular effects of government expenditure on public goods in dealing with poverty issues. They claim if a country spends more on public goods and services, such as education and public health infrastructures, then this country will have lower level of poverty. What’s more, they also find that there exist differences between different types of regimes on government public goods expenditures, while democracies tend to spend more on public services than nondemocracies do. In this research paper, I will introduce three different outside sources, and all of them are coming from books and academic articles. Those three previous empirical works done by political scientists find that democratic governments tend to spend more on one specific public sector than nondemocratic governments, and then these spending are effectively contribute to the welfare improving of the poor. The first source is a book, and it addresses that democracy tend to have lower poverty level because they generate pro-majority policies coincide with pro-poor policies, producing more public goods and carry out income distribution than nondemocracies do (Acemoglue & Robinson, 2006). The second resource, which is from a journal article, explores the political influences on the public health. It states that a democratic country is more willing to spend more money on the public health, resulting in high life expectancy in the country (Ghobarah, Huth, & Russett, 2004). The last source, which is also from a journal article, argues that regardless the levels of development, for any random selected country, its regime makes effects on the Infant Mortality Rate (IMR), while fewer children die in a democratic regime country (Navia& Zweifel, 2000). As a consequence, these three sources are valuable for this my research because they all basically address that to promote a democratic transition is a good choice if a country wants to effectively improve the welfare of poor and overcome poverty.

Acemoglu, D., & Robinson, J. A., 1960. (2006). Economic origins of dictatorship and democracy. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press.

In this book, the two authors start their theory by conceiving the society into two different groups-the elites and citizens, while the later were more numerous. They state that their framework emphasizes that social choices are inherently conflictual. Democracies generate a political equality situation relative to nondemocracies do because nondemocracies represent small group of the society and generate a political inequality situation. For short, they argue that the rich will be opposed to redistributive taxation; whereas the citizens, who will be relatively poor, will be in favor of taxation that would redistribute resources to them. Policies or social choices that benefit the elites will be different from those that benefit the citizens.

This book is significant for my research because it provides a theory to help me conduct the research. Those two authors did a lot of research on the political transition theory and their theories are really argumentative. Throughout this book, Acemoglu and Robinson clearly states that democracy is thought of as a situation of political equality and characterized by its relatively more pro-majority policies. Often pro-majority policies coincide with pro-poor policies, especially a greater tendency to redistribute income away from the rich toward the poor. In contrast, nondemocracy gives a greater say to an elite and generally options for policies that are less majoritarian than in a democracy. Moreover, they also argue that democracies have its own institutions to prevent rulers stay in office for a long time. Elections will automatically elect them out of office. Therefore, in order to stay in office, rulers in democracies will try to generate policies that favorable by the public. All in all, this book would be helpful for my research topic in order to support my argument because it provides a basic theory to support my hypothesis. However, this book does not use statistical methods to test the theory, but focus on using the qualitative methods. I will use quantitative method in my research to test my theory.

Ghobarah, H. A., Huth, P., & Russett, B. (2004). Comparative public health: The political economy of human misery and well-being. International Studies Quarterly, 48(1), 73-94. doi:10.1111/j.0020-8833.2004.00292.x

In this second article, the author mainly focuses on political influences on the public health. They argue that if a country does not fund a lot to the health care system, then people who suffer from disease will have no access to the healthcare, this country will have low life expectancy. It is obvious that most of the countries in this world that suffer from the poverty always have low life expectancy. What’s more, their research also verifies that there exists difference on government spending on healthcare between democracies and nondemocracies. They emphasizes that democracies tend to have high life expectancy because they spend more money on healthcare system, while nondemocracies are retultant to invest on the healthcare.

This article is significant for my research because it adopts the statistical method and collect data from a lot of countries to test its hypothesis. Also, because there are potentially wide-ranging of complex causal connections that influence the efficiency of public health, the authors use the two stages analysis in their research. The first stage of the analysis is to test whether the political independent variables they propose are statistically significant on the allocation and total spending to the public health or not. Then, the second stage of the research is to test whether these health expenditure are contributing to increasing the life expectancy in a country. This two stages analysis model provides a good example for my research design and I will adopt this model in my own research. Moreover, this research does a really good work on data collection. It collects data from various resources which make their argument more reliable. However, this article does not control the effects of economic development in their research, which then generates the following problem: it is possible that countries spend more on healthcare just because they have high level of economic development, the regime types effects do not actually contribute to the spending on public health. Under this circumstance, it is necessary for us to eliminate economic development’s effects in this research.

Navia, P., & Zweifel, T. D. (2000). Democracy, dictatorship, and infant mortality. Journal of Democracy, 11(2), 99-114.

This very last article particularly concentrates on regimes types’ effects on the infant mortality rate, while controlling the effects of economic development. They argue that regardless the levels of development, for any random selected country, its regime makes effects on the Infant Mortality Rate (IMR), while fewer children die in a democratic regime country. What’s more, they find that democracies have lower infant mortality rate because they provide much more opportunities for their citizens, these factors could be access to the education, the provisions of credits and income, and better healthcare infrastructures for women to give births (since higher infertility can reduce the infant mortality rate).