Democracy, public debt transparency, and sovereign creditworthiness
研究发现，发展中国家公共债务透明度并不依赖于民主制度，且透明度对主权信用度的影响比民主、法治等变量更大，挑战了民主优势论的传统假设。
Abstract Democratic Advantage (DA) arguments explicitly and implicitly assume that democracies have more transparent public debt, enhancing sovereign creditworthiness. This study questions the assumed link between transparent public debt practices and democracy in developing countries. It finds that such practices, which are crucial for investors, (a) do not depend on democratic governance and (b) largely erase the effect that DA variables regime type, rule of law, and property rights have on creditworthiness. In other words, transparent public debt and democracy should not be assumed to go together, and transparent debt practices affect creditworthiness more than DA variables. The findings identify public debt transparency as a statistical and theoretical confounder for current iterations of the DA thesis, which must be addressed to better understand the relationship between democratic governance and sovereign creditworthiness. The policy implication is to not assume that transparent public debt practices are only available to democracies.