I made the graph above when I was trying to find some quick and dirty empirical evidence that democratic countries in Africa exhibited better governance than their more autocratic counterparts. I divided all countries in sub-Saharan Africa into two groups based on their Polity IV score, and then calculated each group’s average number of days to start a business. The latter data set only runs from 2003 to 2008. The trend clearly holds with outlying countries (such as Guinea-Bissau, 233 days to start a business) removed and with the dividing Polity score at 4 or 6 (I didn’t check other scores). The downward trend certainly doesn’t show causation, but it does show that countries that were decently democratic in 2003 more than halved the number of days it would take to start a business from 64 to 29 over 5 years. Whatever caused it, that’s impressive.

I made the graph above when I was trying to find some quick and dirty empirical evidence that democratic countries in Africa exhibited better governance than their more autocratic counterparts. I divided all countries in sub-Saharan Africa into two groups based on their Polity IV score, and then calculated each group’s average number of days to start a business. The latter data set only runs from 2003 to 2008. The trend clearly holds with outlying countries (such as Guinea-Bissau, 233 days to start a business) removed and with the dividing Polity score at 4 or 6 (I didn’t check other scores).

The downward trend certainly doesn’t show causation, but it does show that countries that were decently democratic in 2003 more than halved the number of days it would take to start a business from 64 to 29 over 5 years. Whatever caused it, that’s impressive.