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In this chapter, we investigate the interactions between governance quality and economic development. More specifically, we analyze how the institutions through which state authority is exercised influence the level of economic development. In that respect, governance could be considered as a quasi-factor of production which affects the country's economic growth and development, an issue that lies in the heart of institutional economics. The effect of governance on economic development is mainly played out via two channels. Namely, the quality of democracy, distinguished in political rights and civil liberties, and the level of corruption, associated with the exercise of state authority. Good governance is in principle associated with a high quality of democracy and a low level of corruption. Both generate positive effects on the level of economic growth and development, mainly due to their impact on state effectiveness and private and public investment. At the same time, there also exists an inverse causality: the level of economic development affects positively the quality of democracy and negatively the level of corruption which in turn tend to improve the quality of democracy. These coexistent mechanisms are associated with crucial policy issues which are largely neglected by the traditional theory of economic growth.

The difficulties that MR poses for comparativists were anticipated 40 years ago in Sidney Verba's essay “Some Dilemmas of Comparative Research”, in which he called for a “disciplined configurative approach…based on general rules, but on complicated combinations of them” (Verba, 1967, p. 115). Charles Ragin's (1987) book The Comparative Method eloquently spelled out the mismatch between MR and causal explanation in comparative research. At the most basic level, like most other methods of multivariate statistical analysis MR works by rendering the cases invisible, treating them simply as the source of a set of empirical observations on dependent and independent variables. However, even when scholars embrace the analytical purpose of generalizing about relationships between variables, as opposed to dwelling on specific differences between entities with proper names, the cases of interest in comparative political economy are limited in number and occupy a bounded universe.² They are thus both knowable and manageable. Consequently, retaining named cases in the analysis is an efficient way of conveying information and letting readers evaluate it.³ Moreover, in practice most producers and consumers of comparative political economy are intrinsically interested in specific cases. Why not cater to this interest by keeping our cases visible?

A broad agreement exists that tourism is an effective instrument for social and economic development. However, there is no specific theoretical or practical framework of tourism for development to be found. Even the key issues have remained unformulated: concept of development, tourism's contributions to development, and tourism policy and governance for development. This chapter first summarizes the development paradigms held in the last decades (modernization, neoliberalism, dependency, and sustainability) vis-à-vis tourism, and then goes on to consider proposals emanating from New Institutional Economics and the Theory of Social Capital. It concludes with the results of a 2011 enquiry, involving some 60 international experts.