Derived from the steelman + listed predictions. These are the framework axes this school makes empirical claims about. Any hypothesis testing one of these axes is relevant evidence, whether or not the school explicitly cited that hypothesis ID.
Size of cash and near-cash transfer programmes (unemployment benefits, means-tested assistance, universal child benefits). Architecturally distinct from forced-saving schemes — see condition welfare_architecture.
Product-market regulation, entry barriers, licensing burdens, network-industry regulation, price controls.
Security of private property rights — formal recognition, expropriation risk, titling systems.
General government spending as share of GDP, excluding transfers already captured under fiscal.transfer_expansion to avoid double-counting.
Trade policy openness — tariffs, non-tariff barriers, FTAs, industrial protection.
Rule of law as institutional substrate — contract enforcement, judicial independence, equal treatment before the law. Upstream of most other axes.
Ease of hiring/firing, collective-bargaining scope, minimum wage rigidity, temporary/permanent contract regulation.
Financial-sector regulation — banking separation, capital requirements, cross-border activity rules, derivatives oversight.
Socialism's goals — collective ownership of major productive capital, decommodified public goods (healthcare, housing, education, transit), workplace democracy — are achievable through democratic political processes without revolutionary rupture. The democratic-socialist programme distinguishes itself from social democracy (which accepts capitalism + redistribution as the end state) by committing to gradually expanding the non-market sector and worker ownership. Key instruments: public option in healthcare expanded to single-payer; public housing expansion at scale; free public universities; sectoral collective bargaining; worker co-determination; citizen wealth funds; breaking up concentrated private power via antitrust + public alternatives. Unlike Marxist-Leninist formulations, it accepts electoral competition, civil liberties, and pluralism as constitutive of its political programme, not secondary.
Historical movements (parties, governments, doctrinal coalitions) whose programmes the framework codes as aligned with, opposed to, or partially aligned with this school's predictions. Alignment is scored by what the movement enacted on each axis, not by the labels it used.
US New Deal 1933-1938 (public-works employment, Social Security, Wagner Act) raised median living standards and reduced unemployment faster than the pre-1933 laissez-faire counterfactual, vindicating democratic reformist economic management.
UK post-1945 Attlee reforms (NHS, nationalisation of coal/rail/steel, expanded public housing) delivered measurable improvements in life expectancy and child mortality without undermining subsequent 1950s-1960s growth.
Clinton welfare reform 1996 (TANF) reduced the income floor for single-parent households in recessions and raised deep-poverty rates among children, consistent with democratic-socialist critique of means-tested conditionality.
Universal single-payer healthcare systems (NHS, Canadian Medicare) produce lower per-capita healthcare expenditure with equal or better life-expectancy outcomes than the US multi-payer system.
Vienna's sustained social-housing programme has delivered lower rent burdens and housing-cost inflation than comparable European capitals without supply collapse, a counter-example to the rent-control-supply-destruction narrative.
Corbyn 2017-2019 Labour programme (rail/utility renationalisation, expanded NHS) did not produce the capital-flight or fiscal-collapse outcomes predicted by market-liberal critics in the 2017 and 2019 manifestos' IFS-modelled scenarios.
US Sanders 2016/2020 $15 federal minimum wage proposal, in meta-analyses of state-level evidence, would not produce the 1.3m-job loss CBO low-end estimate; effect is closer to zero.
Universal child-benefit / expanded child tax credit expansions (US ARP 2021, UK pre-2013 child benefit) reduced child poverty rates by measurable magnitudes in real time.
The v1 decomposition (three channels: WGI gov effectiveness, WGI rule of law, IMF debt/GDP) left 98% of the Nordic-vs-Southern-Europe log GDP/capita gap unexplained
El Salvador's ~98% homicide-rate decline from 103/100k (2015) to 2.4/100k (2023) — with the sharpest decline occurring after the Mar 2022 régimen de excepción and the Jan 2023 CECOT opening — is causally attributable ...
El Salvador's fiscal trajectory under Bukele (2019-2024) shows improvement in the primary balance and stabilisation (or modest decline) in debt-to-GDP after the 2020 COVID spike, achieved via a combination of: (a) the...
Large-scale universal or near-universal transfer programmes produce a three-order causal chain
falsified·Hypothesis:universal_transfer_programmes_labour_force_participation_declineAcross the OECD 38, over 2000-latest, larger general government final consumption as a share of GDP is associated with slower growth in real household disposable income per capita, controlling for demographics, initia...
The natural-gas price shock that began in late 2021 and intensified after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 produced a measurable differential contraction of EU industrial output relative to US, UK, and...
Policy-driven nuclear phaseouts produce a three-order causal chain
German industrial gross value added, manufacturing output, and real household income diverged materially from a synthetic-Germany donor- pool counterfactual over 2018-2025, and a variance decomposition across candidat...
Precautionary-principle-based regulation in the EU produces a three-order causal chain relative to the US regulatory baseline
The EU Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals regulation (REACH, entered into force 2007 with phased registration deadlines 2010, 2013, 2018) imposed substantial fixed-cost registration r...
Binding statutory price controls produce a three-order causal chain
The EU Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) — reporting phase from October 2023, certificate-purchase phase from 2026 — raises the effective landed cost of EU-manufactured CBAM-covered products (steel, aluminium,...
Binding rent control initiates a three-order causal chain
Argentina has experienced 12 distinct episodes of annual inflation exceeding 50% since 1945, each preceded by a fiscal deficit exceeding 4% of GDP financed via central bank money creation
Monetary finance of fiscal deficits (central-bank balance-sheet expansion directed at sovereign obligations in the absence of independent policy rate adjustment) produces a three-order causal chain
Italy's real GDP per capita (PPP, constant international dollars) was approximately unchanged between 1999 (euro launch) and 2023 — a quarter-century of near-zero cumulative growth, with modest levels of variation aro...
El Salvador's FDI inflow, real-GDP growth, tourism arrivals, and business-formation rate accelerated under the Bukele era (2019-2024) relative to a Central American peer-country donor pool (Honduras, Guatemala, Nicara...
India's 1991 balance-of-payments-crisis-driven liberalisation programme (Manmohan Singh's package: rupee devaluation, industrial delicensing, trade liberalisation, FDI opening, partial financial- sector reform) produc...
Chile and Venezuela began the 1999-2023 window at broadly comparable GDP per capita (PPP, constant international dollars)
Canadian GDP per capita (PPP, constant international dollars) diverged negatively from a donor pool of resource-plus-advanced-anglophone-plus- small-open-developed economies (USA, AUS, NZL, GBR, NOR, CHE) starting aro...
Sectoral nationalisation produces a three-order causal chain
Spain's headline macroeconomic trajectory under the 2018-present PSOE-led governments is NOT uniformly worse than a peer euro-area donor pool, once euro-area-common shocks (COVID 2020-2021, 2022 energy shock, ECB rate...
China's 1978 Deng-era reforms — Household Responsibility System in agriculture, Special Economic Zones, dual-track price liberalisation, Township and Village Enterprise reform, gradual opening to FDI and trade — produ...
Under Financial Secretary John Cowperthwaite (1961–1971) and successors, Hong Kong pursued near-laissez-faire economic policy — no capital controls, no industrial policy, minimal tariffs, low flat taxes, and light lab...
From 2000 to 2023, Asian economies that continued market-oriented institutional reform from a low starting GDP-per-capita base — China, India, Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Philippines, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka...
Developmentalist East Asian states (South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, China) pursuing active industrial policy — export-discipline, selective credit, state-directed FDI screening, targeted sector promotion — achieved hi...
El Salvador's homicide rate fell from 52 per 100,000 (2019) to 2.4 per 100,000 (2023) — a 95% reduction — under Bukele's Estado de Excepción security crackdown beginning March 2022
Estonia adopted among the most radical market-liberalisation packages of any post-Soviet state — flat tax (26% universal rate, 1994), currency board (EEK pegged to DM/EUR, 1992), rapid privatisation, unilateral free t...
Canadian real household disposable income per capita has stagnated or grown more slowly than in comparable resource-plus-anglophone-plus-small- open-developed economies (USA, AUS, NZL, GBR, NOR, CHE) over 2015-2023, o...
Strong employment-protection legislation (EPL) with high union wage-setting coverage and limited at-will dismissal produces a three-order causal chain in Southern European labour markets
Sweden’s post-1992 crisis market reforms — fiscal consolidation, inflation- targeting adoption, tax and pension overhauls, and product-market deregulation — predict stronger real GDP-per-capita growth during 1995–2024...
Countries that undertake unilateral tariff liberalisation — defined as an autonomous, non-FTA-driven reduction in the applied weighted-mean tariff of at least 5 percentage points sustained for at least 5 consecutive y...
Higher government-consumption shares predict weaker TFP growth after controlling for public investment, education, and health spending, across a broad panel of advanced and emerging economies from 1970 to 2020.
Australia’s long expansion after the Hawke-Keating reforms (1983–1996) — including tariff cuts, financial deregulation, competition-policy introduction, and fiscal consolidation — is better predicted by market liberal...
Across an unbalanced panel of OECD and emerging-market economies 1980-2020, higher firm-entry rates (new business registrations per 1000 working-age population) predict stronger subsequent 20-year total-factor-product...
Across middle-income and catch-up economies 1980-2020, high state-directed allocation — measured by state-enterprise share of output, directed-credit intensity, and public-investment-driven growth — is associated with...
Democratic socialism predicts this fiscal market-order panel claim should not hold as a general rule: Across a pre-registered panel of OECD and major emerging-market economies from 1996 to 2023, larger government expenditure shares predict lower investment shares after country and year fixed effects and basic macro controls. This tests the crowding-out, tax-expectation, and discretionary-allocati...
Democratic socialism predicts this fiscal market-order panel claim should not hold as a general rule: Across a pre-registered panel of OECD and major emerging-market economies from 1996 to 2023, larger government expenditure shares predict slower real GDP per capita growth after country and year fixed effects and basic macro controls. This tests the crowding-out, tax-expectation, and discretionar...
Democratic socialism predicts this fiscal market-order panel claim should not hold as a general rule: Across a pre-registered panel of OECD and major emerging-market economies from 1996 to 2023, larger government expenditure shares predict shallower private credit intermediation after country and year fixed effects and basic macro controls. This tests the crowding-out, tax-expectation, and discre...
Democratic socialism predicts this fiscal market-order panel claim should not hold as a general rule: Across a pre-registered panel of OECD and major emerging-market economies from 1996 to 2023, larger government expenditure shares predict lower employment rates after country and year fixed effects and basic macro controls. This tests the crowding-out, tax-expectation, and discretionary-allocatio...
Democratic socialism predicts this fiscal market-order panel claim should not hold as a general rule: Across a pre-registered panel of OECD and major emerging-market economies from 1996 to 2023, larger tax-revenue shares predict lower investment shares after country and year fixed effects and basic macro controls. This tests the private-incentive, retained-earnings, and deadweight-loss channels w...
Democratic socialism predicts this fiscal market-order panel claim should not hold as a general rule: Across a pre-registered panel of OECD and major emerging-market economies from 1996 to 2023, larger tax-revenue shares predict slower real GDP per capita growth after country and year fixed effects and basic macro controls. This tests the private-incentive, retained-earnings, and deadweight-loss ...
Democratic socialism predicts this redistribution support claim should hold in the stated scope: Across OECD country-years, disposable-income poverty rates are materially lower than market-income poverty rates at the 50 percent median-income line.
Democratic socialism predicts this redistribution support claim should hold in the stated scope: The 2021 expansion of the US Child Tax Credit under the American Rescue Plan (full refundability + monthly payments + raised maximum) reduced the official + Supplemental Poverty Measure child poverty rate by at least 3 percentage points within the six-month payment window (July- December 2021), w...
Democratic socialism predicts this redistribution support claim should hold in the stated scope: Macron's 2017 reform replacing the French ISF (Impot de Solidarite sur la Fortune) with the IFI (real-estate-only wealth tax) and the introduction of the 30 percent flat tax (PFU) on capital income produced a measurable rise in the French top-1 pre-tax income share over 2018-2022 relative to Euro...
Democratic socialism predicts this redistribution support claim should hold in the stated scope: Spanish top marginal income tax rate dynamics — Zapatero 2007 cut to 43 percent, Rajoy 2012 hike to 52 percent, Sanchez 2021 hike to 47 percent + IGF (solidarity wealth tax) 2022 — produce top-1 pre-tax income share responses that are smaller in absolute magnitude than the OECD median, consistent...
Democratic socialism predicts this worker bargaining support claim should hold in the stated scope: Following Bhaduri-Marglin (1990) and the Stockhammer-Onaran post-Keynesian empirical tradition, advanced economies are heterogeneously classified as "wage-led" or "profit-led" depending on whether a rise in the wage share raises or lowers aggregate demand. The hypothesis tests, in an OECD post-19...
Democratic socialism predicts this worker bargaining support claim should hold in the stated scope: Increased capital mobility after 1980 (capital account liberalisation across OECD) is correlated with declining worker bargaining power, measured via union density and strike frequency.
Democratic socialism predicts this worker bargaining support claim should hold in the stated scope: Worker cooperative conversions (US Main Street Employee Ownership Act 2018, Italian Marcora Law 1985) preserve employment in firms that would otherwise close.
Democratic socialism predicts this labour drag opposition claim should not hold as a general rule: Longer unemployment-benefit duration predicts higher long-term unemployment and slower re-employment wage growth.
Democratic socialism predicts this labour drag opposition claim should not hold as a general rule: In a broad-country panel 1990-2019, higher unemployment-benefit generosity (proxied by public social expenditure on unemployment programmes as a share of GDP and by the OECD net replacement rate where available) predicts lower employment-to-population ratios and higher structural unemployment, co...
Democratic socialism predicts this labour drag opposition claim should not hold as a general rule: In a broad-country panel 1990-2020, the introduction of workfare or activity- conditional welfare programmes (requiring job search, training, or community work in exchange for benefits) predicts higher employment-to-population ratios and lower long-run unemployment relative to unconditional trans...
Democratic socialism treats this labour institution conditional claim as conditional rather than dispositive: Active labour-market policies with strong conditionality predict faster return to employment than passive benefit systems.
Democratic socialism treats this labour institution conditional claim as conditional rather than dispositive: Apprenticeship systems with strong employer-chamber governance predict lower youth unemployment and better wage-employment matching.
Democratic socialism predicts this financial instability support claim should hold in the stated scope: Financial liberalisation (capital-account opening, domestic interest-rate deregulation, removal of credit controls) without prudential regulation (strong supervision, capital adequacy, macro-prudential buffers) raises the probability and severity of banking and currency crises, which can erase lo...
Democratic socialism predicts this financial instability support claim should hold in the stated scope: The 1988-1993 Nordic banking crises (Norway 1988-1991, Sweden 1991-1992, Finland 1991-1993) are a canonical post-deregulation credit-boom-bust panel. Following the mid-1980s liberalisation of credit and capital markets, all three countries experienced bank-credit-to-GDP run-up of >= 25 pp, real-h...
Democratic socialism predicts this financial instability support claim should hold in the stated scope: The US Savings & Loan crisis of 1986-1995 — closure or assistance of >= 1,000 thrifts, Resolution Trust Corporation creation in 1989, FDIC bank failures peaking in 1988-1992, estimated taxpayer cost in the USD 100-200bn range, and a Laeven-Valencia coded systemic banking crisis 1988 — was a US-do...
Democratic socialism predicts this financial instability support claim should hold in the stated scope: The 2007-2009 Global Financial Crisis was a systemic banking-and-credit rupture in the advanced-economy core (USA, UK, Ireland, Iceland, Spain, the Eurozone periphery) with the canonical multi-metric pattern of large credit-to-GDP run-up followed by sharp output contraction, persistent unemployme...
Democratic socialism predicts this market failure support claim should hold in the stated scope: Privatisation of natural monopolies (electricity transmission, water distribution, rail infrastructure, fixed-line telecommunications) without strong independent regulation fails to improve long-run consumer welfare compared to well-governed public ownership or regulated private provision. Consum...
Democratic socialism predicts this redistribution support claim should hold in the stated scope: Across OECD country-years, disposable-income Gini is materially lower than market-income Gini after taxes and transfers.
Democratic socialism predicts this labour bargaining support claim should hold in the stated scope: In OECD country-years from 1990 to 2022, higher trade-union density is associated with lower disposable-income Gini after country and year fixed effects and unemployment controls.
Democratic socialism predicts this financial instability support claim should hold in the stated scope: The 2007-2009 global financial crisis originated in household-debt-financed consumption sustaining aggregate demand despite stagnant real wages, a Minsky-plus-Marx pattern.
Democratic socialism predicts this fiscal expansion support claim should hold in the stated scope: The 1929-1933 US Great Depression contraction would have been substantially shallower with active fiscal expansion rather than the actual deflationary fiscal stance through 1932.
Democratic socialism predicts this austerity critique support claim should hold in the stated scope: UK Cameron-Osborne austerity 2010-2016 reduced output below the counterfactual path and failed to reduce the debt-to-GDP ratio on the government's own timeline.
Democratic socialism predicts this labour stabilizer support claim should hold in the stated scope: The UK furlough-era labour-market intervention coincided with a huge 2020 output collapse but contained unemployment and allowed output to return near its pre-pandemic level by late 2021.
Democratic socialism predicts this labour decommodification support claim should hold in the stated scope: Reduced working-time experiments (French 35-hour week 2000, Icelandic four-day-week trial 2015-2019) did not produce the catastrophic output or employment consequences predicted by standard models.
Democratic socialism predicts this wellbeing beyond gdp support claim should hold in the stated scope: Wellbeing-indicator measures (life satisfaction, ISEW/GPI, HDI) diverge from GDP per capita above roughly $25-35k per capita, indicating that further growth delivers diminishing welfare returns in rich economies.
Democratic socialism predicts this wellbeing beyond gdp support claim should hold in the stated scope: Japanese stagnation 1990-2020 (mean GDP growth under 1%) coincided with stable or improving wellbeing indicators (life expectancy, life satisfaction), refuting the claim that zero-growth necessarily degrades human outcomes.
Democratic socialism predicts this ecological limits support claim should hold in the stated scope: Material-footprint caps (Switzerland's 1-tonne society target, Welsh Wellbeing of Future Generations Act 2015) are technically implementable without triggering the collapse predicted by critics.
Democratic socialism predicts this ecological commons support claim should hold in the stated scope: Indigenous-managed territories (documented across Amazon basin, Canadian First Nations, Australian Indigenous Protected Areas) retain higher biodiversity and lower deforestation than state-protected or privately-held land of matched biome.
Democratic socialism predicts this public ownership support claim should hold in the stated scope: Publicly owned electricity generators (EDF in France pre-privatisation, Vattenfall Sweden) achieved lower-carbon generation mixes than otherwise-matched privatised counterparts in the 1970s-1990s.
Democratic socialism predicts this fossil lockin support claim should hold in the stated scope: Exxon, Shell, BP, Chevron 1980-2020 disclosed knowledge of climate impacts while investing in reserves whose combustion would exceed the remaining 1.5C carbon budget, consistent with accumulation-ecological-limit contradiction.
Democratic socialism predicts this healthcare decommodification support claim should hold in the stated scope: Cuba's life expectancy and infant mortality outcomes by 2000 were strong enough to rank competitively not just against Latin American peers, but against a broad ex-ante fixed pool of non-Latin-American market economies; if Cuba fails that harder comparison, the "socialist health-system superiority" story is more reg...
Democratic socialism predicts this public ownership support claim should hold in the stated scope: Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador resource-nationalisation programmes 2000-2015 financed measurable social-outcome gains (poverty reduction, literacy) despite extractive-output costs, a Pareto-dominance structure depending on normative weighting.
Democratic socialism predicts this gradual public ownership support claim should hold in the stated scope: Post-1991 Russian mass privatisation produced worse output and distributional outcomes than the Chinese gradualist-with-retained-public-ownership path, controlling for initial conditions.
Democratic socialism predicts this public ownership conditional claim should hold in the stated scope: Singaporean state-holding-company model (Temasek, GIC) combines public ownership of commanding heights with competitive enterprise discipline, achieving sustained growth that falsifies the claim that all public ownership degrades efficiency.
Democratic socialism treats this fiscal.transfer_expansion hypothesis as a conditional benchmark rather than a directional win condition: Costa Rican post-1950 development path achieves life expectancy comparable to the US at roughly one-fifth the per-capita material throughput, demonstrating the feasibility of high-wellbeing low-throughput trajectories.
Democratic socialism treats this regulatory.product_market_competition hypothesis as a conditional benchmark rather than a directional win condition: Across a broad panel of economies 1980-2020, market reforms (privatisation, trade liberalisation, and price decontrol) produce durable gains in real GDP per capita growth only when rule-of-law scores exceed a minimum threshold (WGI Rule of Law > -0.5, approximately the 40th percentile of the global distribution). Be...
Democratic socialism treats this institutional.property_rights hypothesis as a conditional benchmark rather than a directional win condition: ESOP (employee-stock-ownership) firms in the US post-1974 ERISA show higher survival rates and comparable productivity to matched conventional firms.
Democratic socialism treats this regulatory.trade_openness hypothesis as a conditional benchmark rather than a directional win condition: The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), with trading formally commencing 2021-01-01, has not yet produced a measurable acceleration in aggregate African trade-openness ratios over the 2021-2024 window relative to a synthetic-control donor pool of non-AfCFTA emerging-market regions, because of slow tariff- ...
Democratic socialism treats this fiscal.spending_level hypothesis as a conditional benchmark rather than a directional win condition: UK Truss mini-budget 2022 gilt crisis reflected market confidence and institutional-framework rupture rather than an MMT-predicted hard fiscal limit, because the BoE restored order by intervening as issuer.
Democratic socialism treats this regulatory.labour_market_flexibility hypothesis as a conditional benchmark rather than a directional win condition: The observed decline in the labour share of gross value added across OECD economies over 1980-2020 (typically 4-8 percentage points) is explained by a decomposable set of channels rather than a single cause: (a) capital-intensity technological change with capital and labour complementarity below unity (Karabarbounis...
Democratic socialism treats this institutional.rule_of_law hypothesis as a conditional benchmark rather than a directional win condition: Conditional on latest real GDP per capita and broad Heritage region, countries with higher Heritage judicial effectiveness in 2024 have higher latest-available gross-capital-formation share. This tests whether the free-market/market-order association survives a first income-and-region robustness screen.
mixed·Hypothesis:heritage_judicial_effectiveness_investment_share_income_region_robustnessDemocratic socialism treats this regulatory.financial_deregulation hypothesis as a conditional benchmark rather than a directional win condition: Conditional on latest real GDP per capita and broad Heritage region, countries with higher Heritage financial freedom in 2024 have higher latest-available electricity access. This tests whether the free-market/market-order association survives a first income-and-region robustness screen.
mixed·Hypothesis:heritage_financial_freedom_electricity_access_income_region_robustnessDemocratic socialism treats this fiscal.transfer_expansion hypothesis as a conditional benchmark rather than a directional win condition: If Cuba's socialist health-system superiority story really travels beyond a friendly regional pool, Cuba should remain at least mid-pack against a small advanced-market subgroup of non-socialist health performers by 2000; if it ranks near the bottom even after adjusting expectations for lower income, the universal v...
Democratic socialism treats this institutional.property_rights hypothesis as a conditional benchmark rather than a directional win condition: Across a pre-registered panel of OECD and major emerging-market economies from 1996 to 2023, stronger rule-of-law institutions predict higher private and total investment shares after country and year fixed effects and basic macro controls. This tests the property-rights, contract-enforcement, and economic-calculati...
Democratic socialism treats this regulatory.trade_openness hypothesis as a conditional benchmark rather than a directional win condition: Brazil's tariff schedule under Mercosur Common External Tariff (CET) commitments has been historically high relative to other middle-income economies and has not declined materially over 1995-2020 — Brazil weighted applied tariffs hovered around 10-12% throughout the period vs OECD median ~3% and emerging Asia media...
Democratic socialism treats this fiscal.spending_level hypothesis as a conditional benchmark rather than a directional win condition: Conditional on latest real GDP per capita and broad Heritage region, countries with higher Heritage lower-tax-burden score in 2024 have higher latest-available account ownership. This tests whether the free-market/market-order association survives a first income-and-region robustness screen.
Democratic socialism treats this regulatory.labour_market_flexibility hypothesis as a conditional benchmark rather than a directional win condition: In OECD annual data from 1990 to 2022, broader collective-bargaining coverage is not associated with a material penalty to real GDP-volume growth.
Democratic socialism treats this institutional.rule_of_law hypothesis as a conditional benchmark rather than a directional win condition: Higher discretionary state-allocation burden proxies predict lower control-of-corruption scores.
Democratic socialism treats this regulatory.financial_deregulation hypothesis as a conditional benchmark rather than a directional win condition: Mexico's December-1994 Tequila Crisis — peso devaluation against the USD by >= 50%, IMF / US Treasury rescue package, real-GDP contraction of >= 6% in 1995, and a Laeven-Valencia-coded systemic banking crisis 1994-1996 — is the canonical EM-currency-and-banking-twin-crisis case of the early 1990s. The hypothesis is ...
Democratic socialism treats this fiscal.transfer_expansion hypothesis as a conditional benchmark rather than a directional win condition: Countries in the top quartile of Heritage lower-government-spending score in 2024 have lower latest-available under-5 mortality than bottom-quartile countries, consistent with free-market country policy regimes outperforming less market-oriented regimes on this outcome.
Democratic socialism predicts this financial-instability claim should hold: In the Schularick-Taylor cross-country macrohistory panel restricted to the post-1980 era, sustained acceleration of bank credit to the private non-financial sector relative to GDP raises the conditional probability of a systemic banking crisis within a five-year forward window. Specifically, country-years in the top quintile of 5-year change in bank-credit-to-GDP carry banking-crisis hazard at least 2x the baseline hazard in the rest of the panel. The mechanism is endogenous: credit-boom-bust cycles, not exogenous external shocks, are the dominant driver of post-1980 banking crises across advanced economies.
Democratic socialism predicts this financial-instability claim should hold: In the Laeven-Valencia systemic-banking-crisis panel covering 1980-2020, four ex-ante observables jointly predict crisis onset: (i) high private-credit-to-GDP, (ii) negative current-account balance, (iii) real-effective-exchange-rate appreciation versus a 3-year trailing average, and (iv) low foreign-exchange reserve coverage of short-term external liabilities. A logit on these four predictors plus country and year fixed effects achieves out-of-sample crisis-prediction AUC of at least 0.75 on a rolling-window cross-validation across the full advanced-and-emerging panel.
Democratic socialism predicts this Cuba health-outcomes claim should hold: universal public health-system mobilisation should produce better basic health outcomes than comparable market-oriented Latin American peers even when wider economic performance is contested.
Public electrification complements private-sector growth when regulatory quality is high; in low-regulatory-quality states, electricity access expansions show weaker links to manufacturing value added and business entry.
Energy-shock relief works better as targeted transfers or temporary tax smoothing in high-capacity states; administered price controls/subsidies predict shortages, fiscal slippage, or lower investment where pass-throu...
Green industrial policy complements markets when it lowers renewable costs or deployment without raising industrial electricity prices; where grid integration capacity is weak, higher renewable shares predict manufact...
Higher industrial electricity prices predict lower manufacturing value-added share and weaker industrial production growth.
Agricultural output growth achieved through forest-cover loss has weaker poverty-reduction returns and worse emissions outcomes than output growth without forest loss.
Fossil-fuel subsidy reductions lower emissions intensity only when paired with household compensation; otherwise they raise poverty or energy stress enough to weaken the just-transition claim.
In high-income countries, material footprint per capita can fall while life expectancy and life satisfaction are maintained or improved; refuted if footprint reductions systematically require welfare losses outside re...
carbon pricing achieves emissions reductions at lower output and household-cost penalties per ton abated than technology-specific mandates of similar ambition.
sustained household fuel or electricity price controls predict higher shortage frequency, larger fiscal subsidy burdens, and lower energy-sector investment.
fuel-subsidy reforms paired with targeted transfers produce stronger 5- to 15-year fiscal balances and social spending durability than unreformed universal subsidies.
network-sector unbundling combined with independent regulation predicts lower prices and better service quality than vertically integrated state or protected monopoly models.
Higher nuclear electricity share predicts lower industrial power-price volatility and lower fossil electricity share.
Higher fossil-fuel consumption subsidies predict higher energy intensity and slower renewable-share growth.
Expanding protected land lowers land-use emissions or forest loss without reducing food production per capita in countries with adequate yield growth.
Public investment crowds in renewable capacity and private investment during slack periods, but is refuted if higher public investment systematically displaces private capital without capacity gains.
Renewable-capacity growth increases net employment or prevents industrial-employment loss in regions with transition policy, while the claim is refuted if capacity growth coincides with persistent employment losses.
Rapid renewable electricity-share growth raises electricity prices in the short run unless fossil or nuclear backup volatility falls.
Lower annual hours worked reduce energy use and emissions per capita without proportionate reductions in life satisfaction or employment.
Fiscal consolidation within three years after recessions lowers employment and potential-output paths relative to countries that delay consolidation until recovery.
Larger automatic stabilizers reduce peak-to-trough GDP losses and poverty spikes during recessions, but may trade off against recovery speed if labor-market reentry is weak.
Public investment raises infrastructure and growth outcomes only where corruption control is high; where corruption control is low, higher public investment predicts debt accumulation without road, electricity, or gro...
Education spending raises human capital and later productivity only where governance quality and teacher/system capacity are high; spending alone is weakly related to outcomes in low-capacity systems.
Discretionary fiscal expansion raises real output with limited inflation when unemployment is above its country-specific 10-year mean, but the output gain shrinks and inflation pass-through rises when unemployment is ...
During the 2008-2012 crisis, faster fiscal stimulus in high-capacity states predicted smaller employment losses and faster GDP recovery; in low-capacity/high-debt states, stimulus size had weaker recovery payoff and w...
Government size only drags growth when the marginal increase is government consumption or wage-bill heavy; public investment-heavy expansions in high-capacity states have neutral or positive five-year productivity eff...
Government spending has a nonmonotonic relationship with growth: moderate-to-large spending is compatible with growth in high-effectiveness states, while similarly large spending in low-effectiveness states predicts l...
Public health spending reduces mortality and raises life expectancy when corruption control is high; low corruption-control states show weaker health outcome gains per spending point.
Industrial-policy intensity proxies such as R&D spending or high-tech export targeting predict durable high-tech export shares only above a government-effectiveness threshold; below it, the same policy intensity predi...
Public investment complements private investment and productivity only in high-execution states; in low government-effectiveness states, higher public capital formation predicts weaker private investment shares and no...
supported·Hypothesis:capacity_public_investment_execution_private_capital_complementR&D spending converts into patenting and productivity only when private finance and regulatory quality are adequate; otherwise R&D intensity is weakly associated with innovation outcomes.
In OECD recessions from 1980-2024, larger automatic stabilizers cushion two-year GDP and employment losses only where government effectiveness is above the sample median; where effectiveness is low, the same spending ...
Social spending reduces poverty more strongly when tax administration and corruption control are high; in weak-capacity states, spending growth has lower poverty elasticity and higher fiscal slippage.
Higher tax revenue supports growth and poverty reduction when tax collection capacity and rule of law are high; above similar revenue shares in low-capacity states, marginal revenue predicts lower private investment a...
Lower out-of-pocket health-spending shares predict lower avoidable mortality and less medical impoverishment after total health spending is controlled; refuted if decommodification has no independent outcome gain.
Government deficits are associated with higher private-sector net saving, especially when current-account balances are stable; the claim is refuted if private saving does not co-move after accounting identities and va...
Public education spending reduces inequality or improves intergenerational mobility only when housing-cost burden is low.
Higher public education spending predicts higher secondary and tertiary attainment among lower-income cohorts and lower intergenerational earnings persistence; a null or regressive attainment effect would refute the e...
Higher interest expenditure shares predict lower public investment or education/health spending in EU country-years outside monetary-sovereign conditions.
Fiscal tightening predicts weaker next-year GDP growth when real interest rates are low or output gaps are negative, but not when inflation is high.
Fiscal expansions during high-slack years reduce unemployment and accelerate GDP recovery more than expansions near capacity, with no persistent inflation overshoot unless supply constraints bind.
R&D spending has larger high-tech export returns in countries with higher government effectiveness and rule of law.
Higher government consumption share predicts lower private investment share, especially when debt-service burden is high.
Higher health-spending shares improve mortality outcomes without reducing medium-run GDP-per-capita growth unless financed through high debt-service burdens.
higher central-bank independence predicts lower inflation volatility and stronger real wage growth over 15- to 30-year windows after controlling for fiscal dominance.
revenue-neutral tax shifts from income taxation toward broad consumption taxation predict higher household saving and private investment, without systematically weaker lower-decile consumption growth when transfers ar...
lower effective marginal tax rates on new investment predict faster capital deepening and manufacturing productivity growth than sector-specific investment credits.
expenditure rules that cap current spending while preserving public investment predict higher private investment and lower fiscal volatility than untargeted deficit rules.
binding fiscal rules with transparent escape clauses predict lower debt-service burdens and faster post-shock recovery than discretionary fiscal regimes at similar initial debt levels.
countries that shift toward broader tax bases and lower statutory marginal rates achieve higher 10- to 25-year private investment growth without lower total revenue ratios than comparable countries relying on narrow b...
Higher public education spending as a share of GDP predicts later human-capital gains only where governance quality is above the sample median.
Higher housing-cost burdens are associated with higher after-tax inequality even after market-income inequality is controlled.
Social spending reduces poverty more effectively when active labour programmes and family benefits make up a larger spending share.
Increases in top marginal income-tax rates lower top-income concentration without reducing medium-run GDP per capita growth or private investment more than matched lower-tax countries.
Higher public health spending reduces amenable mortality, infant mortality, and out-of-pocket burden after income and population-age controls; the claim is refuted if spending growth does not improve outcomes or only ...
Countries with higher pre-2020 public health spending shares had smaller 2019-2022 life-expectancy losses, conditional on age structure and income.
More generous public pensions lower elderly poverty and material deprivation, and the claim is weakened if gains are accompanied by persistent working-age tax wedges, debt-service stress, or lower employment.
Larger tax-and-transfer redistribution gaps predict faster bottom-40 real disposable-income growth over the next three years without a GDP-per-capita growth penalty larger than 0.3 percentage points per year.
R&D spending intensity predicts higher patent intensity only where government effectiveness or rule of law is high.
Higher social spending reduces market-income poverty more strongly where benefits are more cash-and-service universal, and the claim is weakened if poverty falls only through accounting transfers with no improvement i...
Higher tax revenue predicts faster growth only when it is associated with higher public investment or government effectiveness.
Health expenditure per capita increases life expectancy strongly at low and middle spending levels but has sharply diminishing returns above the OECD median.
Higher out-of-pocket health spending shares predict higher infant, under-5, or amenable mortality at a given income level.
Growth in food or crop production per rural worker predicts lower poverty rates and child mortality in low- and middle-income countries.
Declines in agricultural employment share predict faster GDP-per-capita growth only when manufacturing or services productivity rises at the same time.
Broadband infrastructure improves business entry, productivity, and export services when telecom competition and regulatory quality are high; monopoly rollout without competition shows weaker diffusion benefits.
Transport infrastructure raises regional productivity and employment where procurement quality and maintenance capacity are high; low-capacity buildouts show weaker productivity gains and higher debt per road-km impro...
More restrictive capital-account regimes reduce crisis incidence and exchange-rate volatility without lowering long-run investment or GDP growth in emerging markets.
deeper private capital markets predict faster reallocation of capital toward high-productivity firms and stronger aggregate TFP growth than bank-dominated systems with politically concentrated credit.
directed-credit intensity predicts lower marginal product of capital and slower total factor productivity growth than market-priced credit allocation.
moderate-to-strong IP protection predicts higher quality-adjusted innovation and technology diffusion, but extremely restrictive follow-on rules reduce downstream innovation.
stable rule-bound regulation predicts higher private investment and lower investment volatility than discretionary licensing or case-by-case industrial policy.
Higher ICT-sector value-added or productivity growth predicts faster aggregate GDP-per-hour growth.
Human-capital growth predicts TFP growth more strongly than capital-deepening alone over 5-year windows.
Growth in resident patent applications predicts TFP growth over the next 3-5 years more strongly than non-resident patenting.
Universal or broad health coverage improves health outcomes without reducing employment when financed through broad-based taxes or social insurance and managed by high-capacity institutions; payroll-heavy financing wi...
Urban infrastructure investment lowers mortality and supports urban productivity only when municipal/state capacity is high; rapid urbanization without service delivery predicts worse health and weaker productivity.
Energy use per capita has a strong positive association with life expectancy below a threshold but little additional association above high-income levels.
countries implementing durable packages of trade openness, monetary stability, property-rights improvement, and entry liberalization show stronger 15- to 30-year gains in median consumption, life expectancy, and human...
Higher physician density predicts lower amenable mortality, with larger effects where public coverage or public health spending is higher.
Credit-gap booms combined with house-price booms predict higher unemployment 2-4 years later.
Real residential property-price growth above income growth predicts weaker private consumption growth over the next 2 years.
Credit booms turn into damaging house-price cycles primarily where housing supply and permitting capacity are constrained; elastic-supply markets show smaller price booms and smaller post-boom employment losses.
EU countries with faster construction value-added or construction employment growth experience lower subsequent housing-cost overburden.
OECD country-years with higher housing-cost overburden rates have lower real private-consumption-per-capita growth over the next 1-3 years, after income, unemployment, and country/year effects.
Rising low-income rent burden predicts higher child poverty or disposable-income poverty, net of unemployment and GDP per capita.
Capital-market depth raises patenting and high-growth entry when rule of law and disclosure quality are high; in weak-institution settings, market depth predicts volatility and crisis exposure more than innovation.
Regulation complements markets when regulatory quality is high: higher regulatory quality predicts more business entry and less informality; high procedural burden with low regulatory quality predicts lower entry and ...
faster and more predictable contract enforcement predicts larger average firm scale, lower working-capital constraints, and higher labor productivity.
higher formal business-entry barriers predict larger informal sectors and lower small-firm productivity growth over long windows.
improvements in expropriation-risk and property-rights indicators predict higher private investment and longer project maturities, especially in capital-intensive sectors.
Higher collective-bargaining coverage lowers in-work poverty and low-wage incidence with no youth-employment penalty in coordinated systems, but is refuted if coverage mainly prices out young or low-skill workers.
Active labour-market spending reduces long-term unemployment only where case-management capacity and benefit conditionality are strong; passive benefit generosity without activation predicts longer unemployment duration.
Public childcare and family benefits raise female labour-force participation and fertility only when housing costs and childcare supply constraints are not binding; high transfers without supply expansion have weaker ...
In-work benefits increase low-income employment when phaseout cliffs are smooth and administration is simple; sharp cliffs or complex means tests predict lower hours growth and weaker reemployment.
More generous unemployment benefits do not lower employment when activation spending and case-management capacity are high; without activation, generosity predicts longer unemployment duration and lower employment rates.
Childcare and family-benefit expansions raise female labor-force participation and fertility without lowering maternal employment; refuted if cash-only benefits reduce employment or fail to move fertility.
Employment protection improves job security and tenure without creating youth/temporary-contract dualism only when active labor policy and growth are strong.
Higher private-credit depth and financial-sector value-added shares predict lower labor shares and weaker real investment after credit booms, supporting financialization critiques if robust.
Faster services-sector expansion predicts higher female labour-force participation, net of education and income.
Public employment or activation-heavy labor-market programs lower long-term unemployment and poverty more than passive transfers at similar fiscal cost.
In demand-constrained high-income economies, rising labor share predicts stronger consumption and GDP growth, while profit-share gains predict weaker domestic demand.
Moderate minimum-wage bite increases low-end wages and reduces working poverty with employment effects near zero; refuted if high-bite settings show significant low-skill job losses.
stricter employment protection legislation predicts higher youth unemployment and longer unemployment duration after demand shocks, with smaller effects where apprenticeships and temporary contracts are flexible.
high minimum-wage bite raises wages for covered incumbents but predicts weaker youth employment and higher informal employment in low-productivity regions.
lower entry barriers in childcare, retail, transport, and personal services predict higher female labor-force participation through lower household-service prices and more flexible jobs.
higher labor tax wedges predict lower prime-age employment and higher informality over long windows, with larger effects in middle-income economies.
Active labour-market spending predicts faster unemployment declines after unemployment shocks than passive cash-support spending.
Stricter employment protection legislation predicts higher youth unemployment, especially when GDP growth is weak.
Higher minimum-wage bite predicts higher low-education unemployment when productivity growth is below the OECD median.
Higher union density lowers wage dispersion but may reduce employment only where productivity growth is weak.
Larger vocational or work-based upper-secondary pathways predict lower youth unemployment without reducing tertiary progression.
Monetary tightening reduces labor share and wage growth more than profit income during disinflation episodes, implying a distributional cost channel.
Reductions in annual hours worked raise hourly productivity and wellbeing without lowering employment rates when implemented in high-productivity economies.
More generous unemployment benefits reduce household-income losses and recession depth, but the strongest claim is refuted if they materially lengthen unemployment duration after controlling for labor-demand shocks an...
Higher union density raises labor share and lowers disposable-income inequality without reducing medium-run GDP per hour growth once sector composition is controlled.
Higher household debt-service ratios predict slower real private-consumption growth especially after policy-rate increases.
Periods of policy rates below inflation/GDP-growth fundamentals predict later credit-gap and house-price expansions.
Higher pre-crisis bank capital buffers reduce crisis output losses without permanently lowering credit growth in high-supervision states; in weak-supervision states, nominal capital ratios do not prevent credit busts.
Financial depth supports productivity and innovation only under strong rule of law; in weak-rule-of-law settings, private credit growth predicts credit booms and asset prices more than TFP or patenting.
Large central-bank government-bond purchases lower long yields without producing proportional CPI inflation when unemployment is above pre-crisis levels.
US M2 or central-bank balance-sheet expansions predict asset-price inflation more strongly than CPI inflation over post-1990 windows.
credit booms occurring under subsidized or politically directed credit regimes produce deeper post-boom output losses than credit booms under market-priced credit.
negative real deposit rates created by interest-rate caps or high inflation reduce private saving and lower long-run domestic investment quality.
sustained excess broad-money growth over real output growth predicts higher medium-run inflation across regimes, with weaker coefficients only where credible nominal anchors are present.
For monetary sovereigns with floating exchange rates and debt in domestic currency, high public-debt ratios do not predict inflation or default absent real-resource or external-balance stress.
Real effective exchange-rate appreciation predicts lower export product variety and weaker goods-export growth over the next 2 years.
Infant-industry protection works when tariffs are temporary and followed by export-share gains; persistent tariffs without export discipline predict lower consumption growth and no high-tech export upgrading.
Tariff reductions increase consumption and export variety in high-rule-of-law and high-human-capital countries, but generate weak or negative medium-run growth in low-capacity countries with shallow finance.
Countries with both higher domestic food-production growth and higher food-trade openness have smaller food-price and poverty spikes after global commodity-price shocks.
High-tech export shares generate stronger GDP and TFP growth when export concentration is low.
Mission-oriented industrial policy raises high-tech export shares and resident patenting after five to ten years, with support only if gains exceed general R&D and education trends.
customs simplification and shorter border delays predict lower trade costs and faster small-exporter growth than tariff cuts alone.
tighter FDI restrictions predict slower adoption of foreign technology and weaker productivity convergence in tradable sectors.
durable tariff reductions predict lower tradable-goods prices and higher real household consumption, especially for lower-income households with high tradable basket shares.
Higher trade openness raises short-run unemployment volatility but lowers average unemployment in flexible or high-capacity labour markets.
Tertiary attainment growth predicts higher high-tech export shares after 3-5 years, conditional on income and trade openness.
More diversified export baskets predict smaller export and GDP contractions during global downturns.
Higher food import tariffs predict higher food-price inflation and worse poverty outcomes, especially in food-import-dependent countries.
Tariff reductions predict greater import product variety and higher private consumption per capita over 3-year windows.
Higher tariff protection does not predict later high-tech export upgrading unless governance quality is high.
Output or energy-use contractions do not have to reduce basic-needs outcomes when health, education, and food-security institutions are protected; refuted if contractions reliably worsen mortality, schooling, or pover...
Ranked by axis-overlap score. These are hypotheses already in the library whose tests speak to the axes this school's predictions live on, regardless of whether the school explicitly cited them.
These are claims explicitly excluded from testing (contested in mainstream literature or beyond what available data can identify). Excluding them sharpens what remains.