“Acemoglu, Naidu, Restrepo and Robinson (2019) estimate that democratisation increases GDP per capita by about 20% in the long run; Eberhardt (2022), allowing the effect to differ across countries, finds a positive average effect at most about half that size.”

Context. Both studies find a positive long-run effect of democracy on income; they disagree on its size and on how robust and uniform it is across countries.