'CONTRACT INTENSIVE MONEY' & INDEPENDENCIA JUDICIAL

AM | @agumack

"... le despotisme naturalise l'usure" — Montesquieu

En una pausa en mis lecturas sobre la historia de los frenos y contrapesos institucionales, di una vuelta por Google para ver algunos estudios empíricos sobre el vínculo entre independencia judicial y costo del capital. Es un tema clave en Contrapesos. Ahora no tengo más remedio que leer las 78 páginas del informe especial del International Journal For Court Administration publicado en 2018 bajo el título "Measuring Judicial Independence and Accountability". Entre las referencias encontradas me llamó la atención un paper de 2010 escrito por Jeffrey K. Staton, Christopher Reenock y Marius Radean: "Judicial Independence and the Democratic Order". Buscando una medición empírica de independencia judicial —exógena con respecto a 'Democratic order' y disponible en series de tiempo—, los autores optan por el indicador 'Contract Intensive Money' (CIM):

CIM = (M2 — C) / M2

Contract Intensive Money fue propuesto en 1999 por Christopher Clague, Philip Keefer, Stephen Knack y Mancur Olson (*). Mide la diferencia entre el agregado monetario amplio M2 y la cantidad de dinero fuera del sistema bancario, en proporción a M2. En un escenario de perfecta confianza sobre el cumplimiento de los contratos: C = 0 y CIM = 1.

If CIM is a good proxy for contractual enforcement more generally, then the higher a country's CIM ratio, the greater the ability of firms to raise capital, the higher the rate of investment and (other things, like the opportunity for catch-up growth, equal) the faster the rate of economic growth. Note that we are not suggesting that the greater use of more sophisticated, noncurrency monies causes better economic performance.

We are hypothesizing instead that better institutions, especially with respect to contract enforcement, enable a society to obtain a wider array of (real) gains from trade, and, at the same time, facilitate the use of more sophisticated forms of money. Thus CIM is a reflection or measure of the type of governance that improves economic performance rather than a cause of that performance.

* * *

Staton, Reenok y Radean utilizan CIM como la variable independiente en el estudio. Es decir: identifican la cantidad de 'dinero contractual' como proxy de la independencia judicial. Nada de esto hubiera sorprendido a Trenchard y Gordon [ver], Montesquieu, Galiani [ver], Smith [ver] y Necker [ver]. Me llama la atención que pocos economistas argentinos mencionen estos temas, en momentos en que el brutal ataque del des-gobierno a la independencia judicial coincide con una dura crisis económica y con el aumento de la inseguridad. Como bien dicen los autores: "The theoretical inattention to judicial independence in the mainstream literature is alarming". Éstos son algunos de los resultados:

The results suggest that the judicial independence (CIM) generally behaves as we would expect. In most models, democracies with greater judicial independence, as measured by our two indicators, experience both longer-lived tenures as well as lower likelihood of violent domestic conflict and armed conflict. For example, according to Model 1, an increase in contract intensive money from a low of .245 (e.g. Chad in the 1960s) to a high of .99 (e.g. Luxembourg and New Zealand in the 1990s) would increase a democracy's expected duration by a factor of about 6.17 times

In other words, with their level of judicial independence, Luxembourg or New Zealand democratic regimes are expected to last about 6 times longer than Chad's, ceteris paribus. In summary, the additive models provide convincing evidence that democracies benefit from the supply of independent judicial institutions. With both domestic political violence and the ultimate culmination of such political violence, the collapse of the democratic state, independent judiciaries appear to offer some protection against the fear of winning parties violating their promises.

(*) Christopher Clague, Philip Keefer, Stephen Knack y Mancur Olson: "Contract Intensive Money", Journal of Economic Growth, 2.4(1999): pp. 185-212.

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