So now we have to take it seriously! Well I doubt any study can prove something like that, but there you go. Causation could go in both directions, but either way, we told you so.
Public policy, trust and growth: disclosure of government information in Japan.
Date: 2010-12-20
By: Yamamura, Eiji
URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:27703&r=ict
Since the end of the 1990s, local governments in Japan have enacted Information Disclosure Ordinances, which require the disclosure of official government information. This paper uses Japanese prefecture-level data for the period 1998–2004 to examine how this enactment affected economic growth. Furthermore, this paper explores how generalized trust is associated with the effect of information disclosure on economic growth. The Dynamic Panel model is used to control for unobserved prefecture specific effects and endogenous bias. The major findings are: (1) disclosure of government information has a positive effect on GDP growth; and (2) generalized trust enhances this effect on GDP growth. This implies that social trust has a critical influence on the effectiveness of policy.
You know I would read that backwards and say that distrust of the government is the major retardation for economic activity. That’s just me, it explains the result equally well. But yeah: it’s hard to get economic advancement without willing participation, and hard to get participation without trust. So it reads either way. Of course the whole idea of a social contract is reciprocal benefit, shouldn’t take a genius to work that out.
I have mentioned before that I believe Japan is fundamentally changing at a structural level, I read the story of JAXA’s Hayabusa and those guys are doing stuff. Don’t listen to economists talking about “lost decade”, look at what’s happening out there.
[…] Nicholas Gruen points to some evidence that publishing/disclosing government information has a positive effect on GDP […]