Institutional Quality and the Wealth of Autocrats

One frequently given explanation for why autocrats maintain corrupt and inefficient institutions is that the autocrats benefit personally even though the citizens of their countries are worse off. The empirical evidence does not support this hypothesis. Autocrats in countries with low-quality institutions do tend to be wealthy, but typically, they were wealthy before they assumed power. A plausible explanation, consistent with the data, is that wealthy individuals in countries with inefficient and corrupt institutions face the threat of having their wealth appropriated by government, so have the incentive to use some of their wealth to seek political power to protect the rest of their wealth from confiscation. While autocrats may use government institutions to increase their wealth, autocrats in countries with low-quality institutions tend to be wealthy when they assume power, because wealthy individuals have the incentive to use their wealth to acquire political power to protect themselves from a potentially predatory government.

1 Donald Trump is a notable exception here, but Trump is different from most other wealthy Americans in that he was a television personality prior to running for office, a profession that rewards a high-profile public image. Unlike President Trump, most wealthy individuals try to keep a low profile and remain out of the public eye rather than seeking personal recognition, as Trump did well before he ran for public office. economic reforms in Ghana and Sierra Leone to show how improving economic institutions can work to the detriment of political elites. This evidence is anecdotal: a theoretical framework with case studies that provide examples consistent with the model. Anecdotes can also be found that lean the other way. Both Augusto Pinochet in Chile and Park Chung-hee in South Korea were autocrats who held power for 16 years in their countries and implemented substantial economic reform, which provided benefits to both the autocrats and their citizens. 2 Examples can be cited both for countries in which autocrats ruled countries that remained poor and with low-quality institutions and cases in which autocrats improved institutional quality and oversaw institutional improvement and increases in income. If better institutions create wealth, there should be a way to distribute that wealth so that everyone benefits, although Rodrik (2014) notes that it can be difficult to design institutional reforms that guarantee that everyone will share in the gains. Anecdotes can be chosen to support various conclusions.
Evidence on the issue is mostly anecdotal and we are aware of only two studies that look at a cross-section of countries for evidence that political elites benefit personally from maintaining low-quality economic institutions that reduce the standard of living for their citizens. Holcombe and Rodet (2012) use government spending as a proxy for benefits to political elites under the assumption that while those elites cannot appropriate all that government spends, they control who gets the benefits of that spending. They look at a set of more than 100 countries with all types of governments -not just autocracies -to see if lower-quality economic institutions increase the size of government, both in real per capita terms and as a share of total income. They find that better economic institutions are associated with a larger government share, which suggests that political elites could benefit from improved economic institutions. Political elites have control over more resources when economic institutions are improved, calling into question the conventional wisdom that political elites benefit from maintaining low-quality economic institutions.
Looking at the claim of Acemoglu and Johnson (2006) that institutional reforms may destabilize the incumbent regime, Holcombe and Boudreaux (2013) examine a dataset of 80 autocrats and find that the greater the increase in the quality of economic institutions under their tenure, the longer their tenure, indicating that autocrats can increase their hold on power by improving institutional quality. The few studies that analyze a dataset of multiple countries rather than anecdotal evidence and case studies conclude that autocrats can improve their control over resources and their hold on power by implementing higher-quality economic institutions, calling into question the hypothesis that autocrats maintain poor institutions because they benefit at the expense of their citizens. 2 Another possibly relevant example is Mikheil Saakashvili's presidency of the Republic of Georgia from 2004-2013. Although Saakashvili was elected, Georgia was poor and its government was corrupt and inefficient when he came to power. Substantial economic reforms led Georgia to prosper relative to its economic status prior to his presidency and when compared with other former Soviet republics in the Caucuses. As president, Saakashvili was also accused of appropriating property without compensation and cronyism during his term in office. This is an example of a political leader who improved economic institutions both for the benefit of his citizens and himself and his cronies as an elected leader.
This study examines additional evidence on the relationship between autocrat wealth and the quality of economic institutions. The evidence here is more direct than in previous studies, although it is from a limited dataset on the wealth of 35 autocrats. There is no comprehensive data available on the wealth of autocrats, so this study relies on data collected from various sources on that wealth. Recognizing the limitations of the data, the findings here are conclusive.
Rather, they offer some additional evidence that calls into question the hypothesis that autocrats benefit personally from maintaining low-quality economic institutions.
The results that follow are consistent with the hypothesis that in countries with low-quality institutions, wealthy individuals are attracted to political power, perhaps to protect their wealth from predation that can occur in countries that have a poor record of protecting property rights and establishing rule of law. Table 1 lists 35 autocrats along with their countries, the time periods in which they were in power, and their wealth. Data sources are listed in Appendix 1. The dataset is limited because these were the only autocrats for which we were able to find estimates of their wealth. Wealth Included in the list are several monarchs who have limited power over their governments but who have retained power that is largely symbolic. While they would not ordinarily be classified as autocrats, they make a good comparison group as wealthy heads of state in countries that have relatively high-quality economic and political institutions. This allows a comparison of the effects of institutional quality that includes a wider range of institutions, rather than just lowquality institutions.

Data on the Wealth of Autocrats and Institutional Quality
The quality of economic institutions was measured using the Fraser Institute's Economic Freedom of the World (EFW) Index, updated annually by Gwartney, Lawson, and Hall (2012).
The EFW index is frequently used as a measure of the quality of economic institutions. It is designed to quantify the level of economic freedom that exists in a country, and is deliberately designed to quantify the quality of economic institutions but to leave out measures of political freedom, such as civil liberties or democratic government. Thus, it is a good measure of institutional quality to use for the examination of the hypothesis that autocrats can increase their wealth by imposing economically unproductive institutions. Literature reviews by Berggren (2003) and De Haan, Lundstrom, and Sturn (2006) show that countries with higher-quality economic institutions as measured by the EFW index, have higher per capita incomes, and countries that improve their economic freedom as measured by the index have higher rates of economic growth. Subsequent studies, such as Faria and Montesinos (2009), have reaffirmed the positive impact of market institutions. Countries with higher quality institutions, as measured by the EFW index, are more prosperous. This makes the EFW index the ideal measure of the quality of economic institutions for present purposes, because of the many studies that have shown it is positively correlated with per capita income and income growth. While there is little doubt that higher-quality economic institutions improve the economic well-being of a country, the question examined here is whether autocrats who maintain low-quality institutions to the detriment of their citizens receive personal benefits in the form of higher personal wealth. It is a more direct measure of personal benefit than was used in any of the previous studies.

Institutional Quality and the Wealth of Autocrats
The hypothesis that autocrats maintain low-quality institutions to increase their wealth is tested directly in an OLS model by looking at the correlation between autocrat wealth and institutional quality. The dependent variable is the log of the wealth of each political leader, W, and the major independent variables are measures of the quality of economic and political institutions at the beginning of the leaders' tenure and the average annual change in institutional quality Other factors could also affect autocrat wealth. Most obviously, people in wealthier countries tend to be wealthier, so per capita income when the autocrat comes to power, InitialPCI, and the change in per capita income over the autocrat's tenure, PCIRate, are included. Some scholars, such as Diamond (1997) and Sachs (2001), have suggested that natural resource endowments can affect incomes and institutional quality, so a measure of resource rents, R, is included in the empirical model. Easterly (2006) and Coyne (2013) have suggested foreign aid is often counterproductive to the countries that receive it, although it might benefit a country's political elite, prompting the inclusion of foreign aid, F, in the empirical model. Another geographic factor often associated with a state's economic well-being is distance from the equator, D. Following Holcombe and Boudreaux (2013), the length of tenure, T, of an autocrat might be related to the autocrat's wealth, and a binary variable, M, is included which is 1 for autocrats who are monarchs and 0 otherwise. 3 Appendix 2 shows variable definitions and sources. The empirical specification is The empirical results for eight different empirical specifications are reported in Table 2.
The specifications differ only in that four of them include only EFWRate, not, InitialEFW, and different measures are used to measure the differences in political institutions. In the eight different specifications, InitialEFW is never statistically significant at the 10 percent level or better, while EFWRate is positive and statistically significant at the 10 percent level in three of the four specifications which omit InitialEFW. The results in Table 2 indicate that the quality of economic institutions at the time an autocrat takes office are unrelated to autocrat wealth, but there is weak evidence that wealth is higher when the quality of economic institutions improves over the autocrat's tenure. Consistent with previous studies, those results show that if anything, autocrats benefit from improvements in the quality of economic institutions during their tenures.
Initial per capita income is statistically significant at the 10 percent level in half of the regressions, and the autocrat's length of tenure is statistically significant in all of them. Autocrats who rule over higher-income countries tend to have higher levels of wealth, and autocrats who retain power longer tend to have higher wealth. The direction of causation of the tenure variable is uncertain. Wealthier autocrats might have an advantage in maintaining power, but it also may be that longer tenures allow more time to accumulate wealth. The wealth variable measures wealth at the end of the autocrat's tenure, and data limitations do not allow calculating the change in the autocrat's wealth over the autocrat's tenure. Perhaps the Tenure variable is significant because autocrats with longer tenures tend to come to power at a younger age. To check for this, the age that autocrats assumed power was substituted for Tenure, and the age variable was significant. However, when both age and Tenure were included in the same regressions, Tenure remained significant but age did not. Thus, we report the specifications than include only the Tenure variable. Note. N=35 observations. t statistics in parentheses. + p<0.10* p<0.05 ** p<0.01 *** p<0.001 One possible area of concern in the list of autocrats used here is that they represent governments with vastly different government structures. The list includes the Queen Elizabeth

II of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and former President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, for
example. The inclusion of these measures of political institutions should mitigate those differences by taking into account the political structure. As a robustness check, the regressions were run without Elizabeth II, and without Assad of Syria, and the results are essentially unaffected. 4 Monarchs were also separated out with a binary variable, and Table 2 shows that the monarchy variable was never statistically significant.
The quality of political institutions is controlled for in the same way as economic institutions.  Note. N=35 observations. t statistics in parentheses. + p<0.10 * p<0.05 ** p<0.01 *** p<0.001. † in thousands. Dependent variable is ordered in four categories.
In all regressions, whether the Polity2 index or variants of the Freedom House index are used to quantify the quality of political institutions, lower-quality political institutions are associated with higher levels of autocrat wealth. Autocrat wealth tends to be higher when autocrats come to power in countries that are less democratic, where citizens have fewer political rights and lower levels of civil rights. Assuming that political freedom and more democratic control of government are good things, the lower the quality of political institutions when an autocrat assumes power, the higher will be the autocrat's wealth. Regardless of how the quality of those political institutions is measured, the coefficients are always significant at the 1 percent level.
As a robustness check on these results, Autocrat Wealth was respecified into four categories: 1: those with wealth under $100 million; 2: wealth between $100 million and $1 billion; 3: wealth between $1 billion and $10 billion; and 4: wealth greater than $10 billion.
Ordered probits were run using the same eight specifications as in Table 2, and those results appear in Table 3. The results are mostly unchanged, but with two differences worth noting. The Polity2 Rate is not significant in the ordered probit, but more noteworthy, EFWRate is strongly significant and positive in all four specifications in which it is included.
Autocrats are wealthier in countries that have improving economic institutions under their rule. Consistent with Holcombe and Rodet (2012) and Holcombe and Boudreaux (2013), this suggests that an increase in the quality of economic institutions makes autocrats better off, which calls into question the conventional wisdom that autocrats benefit from maintaining lowquality institutions. Consistent with the results in Table 2, the measures of initial political institutions all remain negative and highly statistically significant. Also note that, in contrast to Table 2, the monarchy variable is positive and statistically significant in all of the regressions in Table 3. While this indicates that monarchs tend to be wealthier than other autocrats, the institutional variables are qualitatively the same in both tables. Table 4 shows a correlation matrix with all of the economic and political institutions variables.
The Table shows a  wealthy autocrats overseeing countries with low-quality economic institutions and inferred that those autocrats benefit from maintaining low-quality institutions, but this evidence points to a different conclusion: countries with lower-quality political institutions tend to attract wealthier autocrats. The positive correlation between the quality of political and economic institutions means that those wealthy autocrats will also be ruling countries with low-quality economic institutions. Autocrat wealth is negatively correlated with the quality of political institutions when they assume power. The observation of wealthy autocrats ruling over poorer countries suggests the conventional wisdom that those autocrats benefit from the low-quality institutions, but another possibility is that the wealthy seek political power to protect their wealth from predation by the political elite in countries that have a poor record of protecting property rights and maintaining rule of law. The elite does not benefit from maintaining low-quality institutions, but rather seeks political power to protect itself from being the victim of political predation under those institutions. Where political institutions are weak, wealth is more at risk to be confiscated by the political elite, so the wealthy have an incentive to convert some of its wealth into political power, to protect the rest.
We do not doubt that once it gains political power, the political elite will use that power to further its own interests, but examples of corrupt autocrats using political power to their advantage do not speak directly to the conventional wisdom. The question is whether the political elite would benefit more from maintaining low-quality institutions or from initiating institutional improvements, and all of the evidence so far-including the evidence in this paperindicates that the political elite would be better off by overseeing improvements in institutional quality.

Conclusions
A substantial literature demonstrates that states with economic institutions that protect property rights and support market exchange prosper, while those with poor institutions that inhibit market activity remain poor. Mokyr (1990) and Landes (1998) give persuasive historical evidence, and Olson (1996) notes that profit opportunities do not remain unexploited for long.
Poor countries remain that way because their economic institutions prevent innovative and entrepreneurial acts from being profitable. Entrepreneurial individuals are led to predatory rather than productive activity in countries with low-quality economic institutions, Baumol (1990) notes. Gwartney, Lawson, and Hall (2012) identify and quantify those institutions that lead to prosperity. If economists know what economic institutions lay a foundation for growth and prosperity, an important question for world economic development is why poor countries do not adopt those institutions. A commonly-given answer is that even though most of the population would benefit from institutional reform, the political elite benefits from maintaining those lowquality institutions, even as they impose costs on most people in their countries.
This paper has two main conclusions. First, it offers support for a small empirical literature which finds that autocrats do not benefit from maintaining low-quality institutions. Autocrats who maintain low-quality institutions do not increase their wealth as a result, and this finding is consistent with an existing literature finding that if anything, autocrats will be better off if they oversee improvements in institutional quality. The empirical evidence indicates that the hypothesis that autocrats in poor countries maintain low-quality political institutions because they benefit is incorrect.
Second, the paper finds that there is a negative correlation between the quality of political institutions and the wealth of autocrats at the time when they assume power. Rather than asking why autocrats maintain low-quality institutions, this result suggests a different question, which is why countries with lower-quality political institutions attract wealthier autocrats. A possible explanation for this is that high-quality political institutions protect individual wealth, so wealthy individuals in countries with high-quality institutions do not need to assume positions of political power to retain their economic power. Wealthy autocrats tend to assume power in countries with low-quality political institutions. They can use their wealth to try to buy political power, and then use their political power to try to protect and enhance their wealth. An important question is whether maintaining low-quality economic institutions furthers those goals, and this paper supports a recent literature that says it does not. The results in this paper go a good distance toward understanding why even though wealthy autocrats rule countries with poor institutions, they do not benefit from maintaining low-quality institutions.
When wealthy autocrats gain political power, they will use it to enhance and protect their wealth. We do not disagree with the conventional wisdom on this point. The question is whether it is to their advantage to maintain low-quality economic institutions, and this paper provides additional evidence to support the existing literature which says they do not. Political elites tend to be wealthier in countries with low-quality institutions not because they benefit from keeping institutional quality low, but because where institutional quality is low the wealthy have a greater incentive to seek political power.
Any empirical evidence on a hypothesis is always tentative. The questions addressed here are important for economic development and to date, the small amount of empirical research has not found evidence that low-quality institutions benefit the political elite. More research would be welcome, either to reinforce the tentative conclusion that the political elite does not benefit from maintaining low-quality economic institutions, or to provide evidence that when other data are examined or other methods are used, there is indeed evidence to support the hypothesis that autocrats receive personal benefits from maintaining these institutions. It appears that autocrats in countries with low-quality institutions tend to be wealthier because the wealthy have a greater incentive to seek political power in those countries, to protect their wealth, but this tentative conclusion would benefit from further research.
Important implications for development policy turn on the question. One would be hardpressed to argue that autocrats do not understand what is in their own interest. If the conclusion that autocrats do not benefit from maintaining low-quality economic institutions holds up to further scrutiny, this would suggest that outside agencies and foreign governments can look for ways to help autocrats implement institutional reform. If the conventional wisdom is correct, then there is more of an argument for pushing for regime change and perhaps broader political reforms. Further research on this issue would be very worthwhile, regardless of whether it supports our finding or, after further study, finds contrary evidence.