Navigating poverty in developing nations: unraveling the impact of political dynamics on sustainable well-being

Abstract

Political instability, dismal governance, and corruption are among the factors that currently distress poverty. The primary objective of this research was to determine how political factors distress poverty in developing nations, which has perhaps not been investigated yet. The main objective was also to observe if the effect of political factors on poverty is a dilemma or a reality. Poverty (dependent variable) has been divided into two segments: income poverty index and Human Health Poverty Index; however, political factors (independent variables) studied were corruption, democracy, governance, and political globalization. Twenty-six years of data were taken from 1997 to 2022 of twenty-four developing nations. The poverty and institutional quality indices were constructed through Principal Component Analysis (PCA). The Fixed Effect, System GMM, and 2SLS approaches were used to determine the dynamic impact on poverty. Furthermore, this study incorporated fixed effects with Driscoll-Kraay standard errors to address cross-sectional dependence. The findings indicated that, although there was a significant connection between governance and income and human poverty. Democracy also showed a negative and significant relationship in the income poverty model but insignificant in the human poverty model. Political globalization showed negative and significant associations with poverty models (income and human poverty). Conversely, corruption showed a significant positive relationship in poverty models, i.e., income and human poverty.