Sociologie et criminologie-Open Access
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Socioeconomic and Political Dimensions of Development Worldwide

Kostas Rontos, Luca Salvati and Ioannis Vavouras

The scope of this paper is to examine the main economic, social and political dimensions of development worldwide. More specifically, our analysis focuses on the study of the links between the levels of income per capita, the level of perceived corruption, the degree of human development, the extent of government effectiveness and the quality of the political system as the main variables describing the level of overall development in a country. As we expected, we find that all these factors are very important determinants of the scale of overall development, since combinations of these factors according to their values determine clusters of countries with different patterns of overall development. As a result, an effective policy towards development demands integrated strategies that incorporate efforts for low corruption and high income, human development and government effectiveness levels. However, in order these strategies to be sustainable in the long run they should be associated with democratic transformations. If democracy is not consolidated and the political system is not characterized as free, overall development cannot be effectively achieved and especially maintained at the long run basis, in spite of any currently prevailing high income levels.