Does the Governorship Matter for Provincial Economic Development?

Abstract

ABSTRACT Appointed provincial governors do not have any power to make new policies apart from the ones made by the central government, but they are legally responsible for their implementations. In addition, they are not appointed for a specific time period and can be rotated even within a year or can stay longer where they are assigned. However, governors are overtly or covertly influential on provincial development since they have the central government’s authority in the local administration. In this respect, using a new panel dataset, the current study seeks to find out if there is a relation between a governor’s length of tenure and provincial economic development. The empirical results of the study show a negative relationship between the length of tenure and the economic development of provinces. In addition, longer tenure years are related to lower economic development, while the too-short length of tenure has no significant impact on the economic development of the provinces.