Does Human Rights Enhance Economic Growth?: Panel Evidence from Developing Countries

This study attempts to examine the impact of human rights and economic growth by utilizing two measures of economic growth for developing countries and an unbalanced data spanning from 1961-2017. The hypothesis of the study asserts that improvement in human right protection score increases economic growth in an economy. Firstly I conducted panel unit root test to see if the variables are stationary. After verifying the stationarity of variables at levels (i.e., I(0)) based on panel unit root tests, empirical estimations were conducted without the fear of potential spurious regression problem. According to the estimation results, in parallel to prior expectations, positive statistically significant effect on economic growth was identified for the variables of human right protection, physical capital investment, education investment, openness whereas negative statistically significant effect on economic growth was identified for the variable of inflation in all models estimated. Estimation results indicate that countries trying to reach to higher economic growth, besides the other determinants of economic growth, must pay attention to human right protection and implement policies that prioritizing human right protection.