institutional quality

In recent decades, bilateral and multilateral investment treaties have become key international legal tools to encourage foreign direct investment (FDI) by providing protections that attract foreign investors. Consequently, many developing countries enter into bilateral investment treaties (BITs) to boost FDI inflows. This study aims to investigate the impact of these treaties on FDI in developing countries, analyzing economic data from 21 developing nations from 2007 to 2022 through an attraction model. The findings indicate that BITs have a consistently positive and significant impact on FDI across all models, with a particularly strong effect observed among developing countries. Additional variables—including institutional quality, colonial ties, and a free trade agreement dummy variable—were added to the model. When a BIT is concluded, the host country provides foreign investors with a reliable institutional framework that may offer better investment protection than domestic institutions. In this context, BITs and domestic institutional quality appear to be substitutes, leading to an expected negative relationship. On the other hand, BITs can also serve as a signaling mechanism, indicating to foreign investors that the host country is committed to safeguarding their investments. To capture this effect, an interaction term between BITs and institutional quality was added to the model. This interaction variable is negative across most country pairs, indicating substitutability, but is positive and significant among pairs of developing countries, highlighting a unique dynamic in these contexts.

Considering the significant gap between the GDP of developing and developed countries, identifying the factors that cause this gap is of particular importance between the most important of these factors, the difference in the level of innovation introduced. Innovation and its improvement promises to improve economic growth, and efforts to identify factors affecting innovation are considered prerequisites for designing policies affecting economic growth, which include economic structure and institutional quality. Institutions influence physical investment, human capital, technology, and the organization of production by reinforcing the key incentives of economic agents. Therefore, institutional quality can also approved as a key factor and foundation for continuous and stable economic growth. Finally, the existence of appropriate institutional quality through the channel of laws and economic tools leads to the expansion of innovation and creativity in the production process. With this background, the present study investigates the interactive effect of innovation and institutional quality on production based on panel data and the generalized method of moments (GMM). The gross domestic product of selected science-producing countries was analyzed separately from developed and developing countries from 2011 to 2020. The results show that the interactive effect of innovation and institutional quality on the GDP of both groups of selected developed and selected developing countries is positive and significant, except the intensity of its upshot on the GDP is large in the selected developed countries. Also, the effects of other variables, including the accumulation of physical capital, labor and human capital, on GDP in both groups of selected countries, with differences in the intensity of the effect, are estimated to be positive and significant.

Understanding the relationship between institutions and economic performance, as well as how institutional quality differs across countries, has attracted increasing attention in recent years. Northern countries support economic progress due to having strong institutions. On the other hand, weak institutions in southern countries prevent their progress. Therefore, it is very important for policymakers to identify the factors affecting institutional quality and to understand how institutional quality affects economic growth in order to develop efficient economic policies. The main motivation of the present study is to understand the effect of improving institutional quality on Iran's economic growth through total factor productivity using the Global Trade Analysis Project model. In this regard, the data were aggregated into two regions (Iran and the rest of the world) and ten sectors based on the research objective. To achieve the main objective of the study, two scenarios were evaluated: 1) Increasing the growth rate of production factor productivity in Iran (due to improving institutional quality); 2) Increasing the growth rate of production factor productivity in other regions of the world (due to improving institutional quality). The results show that improving institutional quality through increasing the growth rate of production factor productivity in Iran leads to higher economic growth in Iran and its sub-sectors.

 With the process of economic development, environmental destruction and financial development of MENA member countries have increased. Therefore, in order to protect the environment, it is necessary to identify the factors affecting environmental degradation, especially the impact of financial development and its adjustment mechanisms. In addition, the impact of financial development on the ecological footprint was also investigated through the channel of human capital and institutional quality. This descriptive-analytical study was conducted at the international level for MENA member countries. The data was panel data for the years 2000-2020, which was extracted from the World Bank database. Im, Sons, Shin and Levin, Lin and Chu tests were used to check reliability, Pedroni and kao tests to check co-collinearity, and fully modified ordinary least squares (FMOLS) methods were used to estimate models in Eviews 10 software. The Financial development and GDP increased and human capital and institutional quality decreased environmental degradation. Also, financial development reduced the destruction of the environment through the channel of human capital and institutional quality, so it is suggested that governments, while expanding the capacity of good governance, move the laws governing the financial development of countries in favor of nature-friendly industries and human capital as an important factor in quality Increase the environment.

Today, the issue of protecting the environment and preventing its destruction is considered as one of the most important issues of global society. In neoclassical economics, capital and labor were considered as the engine of economic growth, but in recent decades, energy has become one of the main elements of economic growth. In a way, the economic growth of any country depends on the growth of its energy input (Zheng and Walsh, 2019). Along with energy use, greenhouse gas emission is also a term that is often used and the two are interconnected (Achampeng, 2018; Bacon et al., 2019; Gross and Aydin, 2019 and Reza et al., 2019). According to a report from the International Energy Agency, about 67% of the total carbon dioxide emissions are caused by the energy sector, and it shows that reducing air pollution can be achieved by controlling energy consumption. In an effort to respond to the dangers of climate change, studies suggest ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, including; a) use of renewable energies; and b) the efficiency of using energy resources (Chang et al., 2018). Studies such as Alvarez-Hranz et al. (2017); Yuan et al. (2018); Lin and Zhou (2019) and Chen et al. (2019) proposed the use of renewable energy technology to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from energy consumption. However, the best and most cost-effective way to reduce air pollution and climate change caused by energy consumption is the optimal use of energy (Lopez-Pena et al., 2012). Triani et al. (2016) claim that strengthening energy efficiency in the industrial sector is the best tool in terms of cost efficiency to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from energy sources. Therefore, energy efficiency is considered as one of the main strategies for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.Considering the importance of environmental quality and the role of energy efficiency in its realization, in this article we try to examine the impact of good governance indicators on energy efficiency and its spatial effects. Therefore, in the field of energy efficiency, one of the goals of this research is to empirically examine the issue of whether the institutional arrangements of neighboring countries affect the institutional quality of the country itself and, as a result, whether energy efficiency is affected in this way. Therefore, we seek to answer these questions, is there a spatial spillover effect of institutional quality? If such spatial spillover exists, how much can it explain a country's level of energy efficiency? Also, the lack of agreement between the experimental studies in the obtained results and the reporting of different results in them is another factor of investigating the issue in the present research. Spatial studies use spatial econometrics instead of common econometrics. Researchers in business, commercial and demographic studies that deal with spatial data and observations and can replace common econometrics with spatial econometrics. The most important differences between spatial econometrics and conventional econometrics are issues such as spatial autocorrelation and spatial heterogeneity, while the aforementioned issues are not discussed in conventional econometrics and it is ignored that not considering this issue causes a violation of the Gauss-Markov assumptions in this research with a random border approach and patterns Spatial econometrics examines the spatial impact of institutional quality on energy efficiency for a country group consisting of 89 countries and for the period 2002-2020. First, in order to avoid false regression, unit root tests are performed and their results are reported accordingly. The reported results indicate that the variables of logarithm of energy efficiency, logarithm of gross domestic product, logarithm of added value of industry sector, logarithm of added value of service sector, logarithm of urbanization population and logarithm of governance quality index are all at the same level. To estimate and analyze the model, the population spatial weight matrix and the gravity model were used, which were standardized using the row standardization method of the elements of this matrix. The considered model in relation (9) was estimated by SAR, SEM, SAC and SDM methods, and the best estimation method is decided by using the relevant tests. Studies have been conducted on the effect of institutional quality and governance on energy efficiency; But the understanding of the relationship and influence of government institutions on energy efficiency is still limited due to few studies, especially in the era of globalization, where countries interact more with each other and their policies and executive actions are affected by each other. Therefore, in this study, with the aim of investigating and analyzing the effects of institutional quality and governance and their spillover effects on energy efficiency, data from 89 countries were used in the period of 2002-2018. In this study, energy efficiency is estimated using the stochastic frontier analysis model and the spillover effects of institutional quality and governance are investigated with spatial panel patterns. In general, the experimental results show that energy efficiency has spatial correlation in the studied countries, and more importantly, the experimental results support the existence of spillover effects of governance quality on energy efficiency. In the current study, the direct effect of governance quality on energy efficiency was positive, although this effect was not statistically significant, but the spillover effects of this variable on energy efficiency had a positive and significant effect. Therefore, the level of energy efficiency of a country can not only be affected by the economic structure of each country, but in addition to the quality of institutions and executive policies of the country itself, it can also depend on the quality of institutions and governance of neighboring countries. This result shows that the country being surrounded by countries with good governance and institutional framework can affect the performance of efficiency and quality.

Tax evasion is a major component of underground activities or the irregular sector of the economy, and economists are increasingly seeking to analyze this phenomenon. Given that the tax structure is highly dependent on the governance structure and improvements in governance and corruption control structures lead to public confidence in the government and can reduce the underground economy and tax evasion, examining the relationship between the quality of institutions and good governance with Tax evasion are also important. This study tries to answer this question by examining this relationship during the period 1978-2018, whether improving the quality of institutions in Iran can reduce tax evasion and the underground economy in the country or not? In order to achieve this goal, after identifying the factors causing tax evasion, in the first stage using the method of Multiple Indicators - Multiple Causes (MIMIC) to estimate the time series of relative and absolute size of tax evasion in Iran and investigate the causes and effects using Amos software and with maximum likelihood method. Then, in the second stage, after calculating the time series of the hidden variable of tax evasion, in order to study and empirically analyze the long-term and short-term impact of institutional quality and other related variables (inflation and GDP) on tax evasion in the Iranian economy in Time series, ARDL Bounding test method was used.

As previously mentioned, in the first stage, the method of Multiple Indicators - Multiple Causes (MIMIC) method is employed to estimate the time series of relative and absolute tax evasion in Iran, and to investigate its causes and effects using the AMOS software package and the Maximum Likelihood method. After calculating the time series of tax evasion, the model concerning the relationship between institutional quality and tax evasion in Iran during the study period is formulated as follows:LTE = f (LPR, LGDP, INF)                                                                           (1)
Where: LTE: Logarithm of Tax Evasion (obtained in the first stage)
 LPR: Logarithm of Institutional Quality
 LGDP: Logarithm of Gross Domestic Product
INF: Inflation Rate

After comparing the fit criteria and estimated results of the estimated models, a model was selected as the final model and basis for tax evasion calculations in which energy consumption growth, money demand growth and GDP growth as effects and inflation, unemployment rate, export-to-GDP ratio, official exchange rate, per capita income, capital asset acquisition ratio (construction cost) to GDP, and import tax ratio to total imports are considered as causes of tax evasion. This model is in a better position than other estimated models in terms of significance of coefficients of factors and effects of tax evasion. In this model, inflation, tax burden, per capita income and official exchange rate have a positive and significant effect on tax evasion, and economic openness index, government size and unemployment rate have a negative effect on tax evasion. It should be noted that in the selected model, the greatest effect of tax evasion is on the growth of money demand. Also, among the variables of causes, the most impact is related to per capita income. The results of estimating the second-stage model also indicate that the impact of institutional quality is significantly negative both in the short run and in the long run.

The results of calculating the relative size of tax evasion show that although the trend of tax evasion fluctuates in the desired period, but in general it has had an increasing trend over a period of 38 years, so that from 6.12% of official GDP in In 1978, it increased to its highest amount in 2000 (24.46% of GDP) and finally in 2016, it reached 11.33%. Also, the results of calculating the absolute size of tax evasion show that its amount increased from 63664 billion rials in 1978 to its highest amount in 2000 (290250 billion rials) and in 2018 equal to 89095 billion rials.
Based on the results, the sign of the coefficient for the institutional quality variable is negative and significant in both the short run and the long run. This indicates that improvements in institutional quality in Iran during the study period decrease growth of underground economy and tax evasion. Specifically, a one percent improvement in institutional quality in the long run leads to a 0.62 percent reduction in tax evasion.
Furthermore, the findings indicate that an increase in inflation in the long run increase tax evasion in the country. Conversely, an increase in gross domestic product (GDP) serves as a factor in preventing further growth of the underground economy and tax evasion.

Global climate change, exacerbated by the emission of greenhouse gases (mainly carbon dioxide), poses a significant threat to life, the global environment, and development. Environmental degradation is a highly debated issue in international forums and is recognized as a significant concern worldwide. Consequently, researchers and policymakers have shifted their focus from traditional economic growth to green growth. This study explores the influence of economic policy uncertainty, renewable energy consumption, and institutional quality on green growth in Iran from 2002 to 2020. Economic policy uncertainty is measured using a composite index that incorporates currency, monetary, and financial policy uncertainty, calculated through ARCH and GARCH econometric models. Green growth is defined as economic growth adjusted for environmental considerations, based on Ahmed et al. (2022) and Sohag et al. (2022). The Quantile Auto Regressive Distributed Lag (QARDL) method is employed for data analysis. Empirical findings reveal that economic policy uncertainty negatively affects green growth across all quantiles (0.25, 0.50, 0.75, and 0.95), whereas renewable energy consumption and institutional quality contribute positively to green growth. Control variables, including capital stock, employment, and degree of trade openness, are also incorporated in the analysis. Trade openness and capital positively influence green growth across all quantiles, while employment has a negative impact

The purpose of this study is to identify the affecting factors of the industrial products export advantage with an emphasis on the governance quality. For this purpose, after reviewing the literature and identifying the affecting variables of the export advantage, the relationship between variables is estimated with using the panel data models and data of 82 selected countries in the period of 2007-2018. The results showed that governance quality and the quality of transportation infrastructure had a positive and significant relationship with the industrial products export advantage index. Also, the coefficients of the real exchange rate and foreign direct investment are also positive and significant. Based on the results, institutional quality and good governance through creating a stable environment and reducing costs ultimately lead to improving the export advantage in industrial production. Based on the results, policy stability, transparency of laws and contracts, attention to property rights, as well as decisiveness and speed of contract enforcement are suggested.

The main purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of economic indicators, institutional quality and energy efficiency on the ecological footprint (as an indicator to evaluate the degree of environmental degradation). For this purpose, the annual data of 15 MENA countries (Middle East and North Africa) for the period from 1990 to 2021 have been used with the quantile panel approach. The quantile panel model provides the possibility of investigating the effect of research variables on the ecological footprint during different quantiles. The findings indicate the effect of the coefficients of the variables on the ecological footprint in accordance with the expected theoretical foundations; In such a way that the gross domestic product per capita, the ratio of foreign direct investment, and the degree of urbanization and political instability have a positive and significant effect on the ecological footprint, while the index of trade openness, corruption control, the index of democracy, and energy efficiency have a negative and significant effect on the ecological footprint. This effect has not been constant in different quantiles; In such a way that the effect of the variables of GDP per capita, energy efficiency, foreign direct investment ratio, degree of urbanization, and political instability in the high quantiles is far more than the low quantiles, and the effect of the variables of trade openness index, control Corruption and democracy index in low quantiles are more than in high quantiles.

This paper examines the potential of government fiscal support in mitigating the consequences of shocks, particularly in relation to the infection rate of contagious diseases. The focus is on the emergence of Covid-19 and the various interventions implemented by governments to combat it. The study utilizes a cross-country analysis, using a dataset that includes government fiscal measures, infection rates, and selected institutional and economic metrics from different countries. To isolate the effects of vaccinations, the analysis is specifically focused on the year 2020. The findings indicate that a one percentage point increase in the ratio of direct government spending to GDP corresponds to an approximate 0.08 percentage point reduction in the confirmed infection rate. Given the average infection rate of 1.6 percent in 2020, this translates to a significant 5 percent decrease in infection rates. Additionally, the study reveals that the effectiveness of fiscal support measures is influenced by the institutional quality of the countries. Higher institutional quality is associated with greater effectiveness of fiscal support measures in reducing the infection rate. Furthermore, the study highlights that the impact of government spending on reducing the infection rate is enhanced when accompanied by the implementation of governmental rules.

Good governance leads to the improvement of the quality of economic institutions and institutions, and this quality improvement, including in the field of health, affects the way of growth and development. The existence of institutional and structural problems of institutions, which is caused by weak governance, has a negative effect on the performance and effectiveness of institutions and institutions related to health costs. Therefore, the main goal of this article is to find an answer for how the institutional quality of economic actors affects the economic growth of selected Islamic countries in the field of health expenses. In this regard, the good governance index has been used as a substitute for institutional quality, and the idea of ​​the Cobb-Douglas production function has been used to estimate the research model using the heterogeneous dynamic panel data model by the pooled group average method in the time period of 2008-2022. The results show that health expenses have a relatively low impact on economic growth in the short and long term. Considering the interactive effect of institutional quality and health expenditures, the size of this coefficient is positive in both periods and it indicates that improving the quality of institutions related to health expenditures strengthens the effect of this expenditure on economic growth. Therefore, if increased health spending is accompanied by good institutional quality, it will result in greater economic growth. In other words, although the quantity of healthcare costs is important, the quality of the cost is more important. Focusing on the quality of spending increases economic growth.

According to the literature of institutionalism, institutional factors play an important role in the independence of the central bank. The aim of the current research is to investigate the direct and indirect impact of institutional factors on the independence of the central bank in Iran's economy. Therefore, using an econometric model based on the studies of Garriga and Rodrigues (2023) and Dimato et al. (2009), the effect of institutional factors on the independence of the central bank during the period of 1996-2021 has been investigated. Also, in this study, the interaction of the independent variables of the model has been investigated in order to analyze the indirect effects of institutional factors on the independence of the central bank. The results of the research show that although oil rent does not directly affect the independence of the central bank, it indirectly (through corruption and inflation) causes a decrease in the independence of the central bank, which indicates the weakness of the institutional quality and policies. Based on the findings of the present study, it is suggested that the interaction of institutional factors as well as the quality of institutional mechanisms should be considered in economic policies in order to achieve an independent central bank

The present study attempts to investigate the institutional factors affecting bilateral or multilateral investment treaties with regard to foreign direct investment. This is an applied research based on descriptive and correlational approach. In order to test the postulated hypotheses, given the availability of data, 42 countries were considered for the period 2006-2021, and the PPML technique was applied using Eviews 13 within the framework of the gravity model. The results showed that investment treaties have a positive and significant effect on foreign direct investment, although this effect will be greater in the case of developing countries. Factors such as common language, market capacity, and distance also have a significant impact, whereas population and geographic proximity are not significant determinants for the flow of foreign direct investment except for the paired developing countries. In general, the empirical investigation demonstrated that a bilateral investment treaty acts as a signaling device, indicating that the host country is serious about protecting the investment.

Contrary to the public perception that income inequality is due to differences in individuals' abilities and motivations, differences in economic, social, and institutional structures are also important factors in generating income inequality. The complex-structured economies and more developed institutions provide individuals with more opportunities for education and job choice and reduce income inequality. This study investigates the effect of economic complexity and institutional structure on income inequality within the Kuznets curve. The sample used in this study was 43 developing countries during the period of 2015-2002 and dynamic panel econometric method was used to analyze the data. The results indicate that good governance as a proxy for institutional quality, and economic complexity have had a significant negative impact on income inequality in developing countries. These results show that institutional and structural factors, as two other dimensions of development, have also had a significant impact on income inequality in developing countries.

Reducing infant mortality is known as one of the goals of development and an as the indicator of health. One of the factors affecting health in countries with natural resources such as oil is economic dependence on natural resources. It is stated in this way that at first the income from the sale of natural resources can have a positive effect on health, and with the increase in rent resulting from that, the state of institutional quality has weakened, leading to an increase in income inequality and a decrease in gross domestic product, and therefore has a negative effect on health. . Therefore, this study investigates the effect of oil rent on infant mortality using Autoregressive Distributed Lag approach with (ARDL) to investigate the effect of oil rent on infant mortality according to institutional quality and income inequality index during the period 1984 to 2021. The estimation results showed that the oil rent had a U-shaped effect on the infant mortality index in the long term. But this relationship has not been confirmed for the short term. The effect of democracy, GDP and urbanization on infant mortality has been negative in the long term, and the effect of the Gini coefficient on this indicator has been positive in the long and short term. The effect of the corruption control index on infant mortality has had a positive effect in the short term, which confirms the theory of economic wheel greasers.

Because resources, including natural resources, play an important role in economic growth, with speedy economic and population growth, economic growth is facing a scarcity of resources worldwide. Resource-economy co-ordination has become every government’s main focus in reaching strategic development goals in countries that are on the path of rapid economic development. And since most developing countries are dependent on oil revenues and their economic growth is affected by this income, to reduce this dependence, it is necessary to attract foreign investment and receive and transfer technology and knowledge from developed countries. This will be possible due to security and interaction in countries with better institutional quality. The purpose of this study is to inspect the effect of oil dependence and institutional quality on economic growth with the Panel VAR approach. In this regard, 10 developing countries between the years 1995-2019have been selected. The results of the research with reaction functions tells us that the shock of renting crude oil in developing countries affects economic growth positively at first and when reaching its final stages this trend becomes negative. The oil share shock is positive at first and later on has a negative effect on economic growth. In the end the shock from the institutional quality index economic growth in developing countries is negative in the primary stages and turns positive later on.

Existence of natural resources can increase corruption through rent-seeking behaviors if there is no strong institutional framework. In the present study, the role of institutional quality in the impact of natural resource rents on the financial development of Iran in the period 1984-2019 has been investigated. For this purpose, first to extract the indicators of institutional quality and financial development from the model of principal component analysis and then from the Markov switching model to investigate the effect of natural resource rents on financial development in the country in two cases with and without considering Institutional quality index has been used. Increasing the rent of natural resources has had a negative and significant impact on financial development in low regime of the financial development. Economic growth and trade openness have also had a positive and significant impact on all levels and regimes of financial development. Increasing the rent of natural resources in terms of improving the institutional quality index has had a positive and significant effect on financial development in a low regime. Increasing the inflation has had a negative and significant effect on financial development in all regimes of financial development. It shows that improving the quality of institutions in the country is not able to eliminate the Dutch disease and the curse of resources completely, and this issue with the non-significant impact of natural resource rents in terms of improving the institutional quality index in the high regime of financial development in the country is visible.