CIVIL LIBERTY-AN ECONOMETRIC INVESTIGATION
研究了政府压制政治自由的经济原因,检验了哈耶克理论与另一种基于产业行为模型的观点,发现政治压制与经济自由负相关,而与政府垄断程度正相关。
Many governments allocate resources to the repression of the political freedom of their citizens. The dominant economic theory of this activity, associated most prominently with the work of HAYEK, is that political repression is a bi-product of the erosion of economic freedom. This theory predicts that civil liberty will be positively correlated with the degree of economic freedom. An alternative view, derived from models of industrial behavior, is that monopolistic governments will use political repression to protect their property rights, so that concentrated party systems will tend to engage in more repression than competitive systems. Using a cross-sectional sample of 184 states in 1979, an empirical test of the two hypotheses is presented and the evidence is shown to be more consistent with the second hypothesis. In addition, the correlation between civil liberty and a variety of economic variables is examined: the degree of civil liberty is found to positively related to the level of real per capita income and to the ratio of wage and salary payments to total income. The Gastil index of civil liberty provides the empirical foundation for the study.