Relationship between political stability and economic growth/development: The Mena-T case

Throughout history, political stability has been important for societies in many ways. As a matter of fact, it is seen that peace and trust are higher in societies where political stability is ensured and the development level of these societies is higher. As such, especially with the beginning to measure political stability in a concrete way, the subject has started to be examined empirically in terms of economic growth and economic development, and studies on the subject have quickly become widespread in the literature. From this point of view, in this study, the relationship between political stability, economic growth and development for 14 MENA countries and Turkey has been empirically tested. In the literature, it has been seen that studies on the subject mostly examine the relationship between political stability and economic growth, whereas a limited number of studies examine the relationship between political stability and economic development. Therefore, in this study, in addition to the relationship between political stability and economic growth, the human development index (HDI) representing development is discussed and the causality relationship between political stability and human development index is tested. The findings of the study show that there is no short-term relationship between political stability and economic growth for the countries in question, but there is a long-term relationship between the two variables. As a result of Granger causality analysis, one-way causality was determined from political stability to HDI.