独裁者和摩天大楼:独裁统治中的现代白象

Haakon Gjerløw, C. Knutsen
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引用次数: 1

摘要

政治领导人往往有追求昂贵且社会浪费的“白象”项目的私人动机。我们的论点强调,薄弱的问责机制使专制领导人更容易实现这些项目,而民主领导人在这样做方面则受到更多限制。随后,我们通过绘制记录摩天大楼各种特征的全球数据集来测试这一论点的不同含义,摩天大楼是现代白象的一个突出类型。我们发现,专制政体比民主政体有系统地建造更多的新摩天大楼,这一结果对于控制收入水平、国家对经济的控制以及国家和年份固定效应是强有力的。此外,专制的摩天大楼比民主的更过分、更浪费。专制政权也会追求摩天大楼项目,无论他们统治的是农村还是城市。相比之下,在民主国家,摩天大楼的数量更少,而且——刚建成的时候——与更少的浪费有关,而且它们更多是在城市化的民主国家建造的,而不是在农村。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
Autocrats and Skyscrapers: Modern White Elephants in Dictatorships
Political leaders often have private incentives to pursue expensive and socially wasteful "white elephant" projects. Our argument highlights that weak accountability mechanisms allow autocratic leaders to more easily realize such projects, whereas democratic leaders are more constrained from doing so. We subsequently test different implications from this argument by drawing on a global dataset recording various features of skyscrapers, a prominent type of modern white elephant. We find that autocracies systematically build more new skyscrapers than democracies, and this result is robust to controlling for income level, state control over the economy, and country- and year-fixed effects. Further, autocratic skyscrapers are more excessive and wasteful than democratic. Autocratic regimes also pursue skyscraper projects no matter if they preside over rural or urban societies. In contrast, skyscrapers are fewer and - when first built - associated with less waste in democracies, and they are more frequently built urbanized democracies than in rural.
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