20.500.12556/RUL-174656 Liberal economic institutions reduce relative poverty only in developed, individualist societies a global analysis, 2000-2019 Liberal economic institutions – such as secure property rights, modest regulation, and free international trade – seem to boost economic development, but how do they relate to relative poverty? Surprisingly, given the social salience of this question in the age of globalization, there is almost no comprehensive research using global panel data and aggregate indices of economic freedom to investigate it. We construct such a dataset with 139 countries, and present fixed-effects and dynamic-panel regressions of relative poverty on liberal economic institutions, measured with the Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom of the World (EFW) index. Our baseline finding is that over-time increases in economic freedom – especially freedom of international trade but also limited government size – predict modest decreases in relative poverty. This relationship turns out to be heterogeneous and strongly mediated by unemployment, such that economic freedom decreases unemployment, which in turn decreases relative poverty. Crucially, we find that collectivism, a cultural variable, strongly moderates the relationship between economic freedom and poverty to the extent that it becomes non-significant in societies tending toward collectivism. Concerning endogeneity, our results are shown to be quite robust to moderate levels of omitted-variable bias in formal tests, and reverse causality is not an issue. However, dynamic panel models that include lagged values of the dependent variable among regressors indicate loss of significance for some of our main results, preventing us from claiming complete robustness to endogeneity. relative poverty economic freedom liberal economic institutions collectivism unemployment relativna revščina ekonomska svoboda liberalne ekonomske institucije kolektivizem brezposelnost true false true Angleški jezik Slovenski jezik Članek v reviji 2025-10-08 10:32:26 2025-10-08 10:32:33 2026-09-15 10:28:10 0000-00-00 00:00:00 2025 0 0 17 str. art. 103231 Vol. 131 Sep. 2025 0000-00-00 Zaloznikova Objavljeno NiDoloceno 0000-00-00 0000-00-00 0000-00-00 316.334 0049-089X 10.1016/j.ssresearch.2025.103231 243850755 Hocevar_Rutar_SSR.pdf Hocevar_Rutar_SSR.pdf 1 F1E77F571A14A418AD5412D2CD054045 0bb217d304dd3747773b566364622b72bdbcb130c7a9c75717ff1b24dcff54f9 53e13414-a421-11f0-9328-0050569b8976 https://repozitorij.uni-lj.si/Dokument.php?lang=slv&id=219508 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0049089X25000924 0 63244451-a421-11f0-9328-0050569b8976 https://repozitorij.uni-lj.si/Dokument.php?lang=slv&id=219509 Fakulteta za družbene vede 0 0 0