The story that I was never told

Abstract: Winston Churchill once said “democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time”. Can this sentence be related to economic growth and development? This thesis analyzes the economic outcomes of the two main political regimes (Democracy and Dictatorship) in the developing world and discovers that Churchill’s words cannot be applied for long-run growth. The Pooled OLS model employed in Asian and South American nations find that democracy hurts economic growth. Despite this result, the models utilized in the thesis have a low r-squared. Finally, I argue that the evidence found in the thesis is consistent with the theoretical implications of Przeworski, Alvarez, Cheibub, and Limongi (2000) and Huntington (1968).