Between Democracy and Inclusiveness. Conditions for Development Progress in the United Arab Emirates

Abstract

This work contributes to the literature on the role of inclusiveness in a country’s development. The growing promotion and relevance of the concept of inclusive growth, as part of the Sustainable Development Goals on the Agenda 2030 of the United Nations, together with the rise of China, a non-democratic country, underlines the importance to understanding the relationship between democracy and development on one hand, and between inclusiveness and development on the other. With regards to the latter, part of the literature sustains that growth can occur in extractive institutions so long they make an effort to become inclusive. If inclusiveness is inherent in liberal democracies but can also be found in authoritarian regimes with rich economies, is democracy necessary for development? To test the hypothesis that liberal democracy is not a necessary condition for the development of a country, this thesis employs both qualitative and quantitative methods to study the counterfactual case of the United Arab Emirates. The results show that is indeed possible for a country with an authoritarian regime to experience economic progress when inclusiveness is introduced in its economic and political institutions. It also shows that growth is already possible when the degree of inclusiveness is higher in only one of these dimensions, hence laying the foundation for the conclusion that liberal democracy is indeed not necessary for development (at least in the first stages).