Why are the fastest growing countries autocracies?

Why are the fastest growing countries predominantly autocracies? One possible reason is that growth “tigers” are poor countries that begin growing when their distance to the most advanced economies is large, and poor countries tend to be autocracies. All that is needed to reproduce the observed historical patterns is income convergence and a positive association of income with incidence of democracy, with no assumptions about the effect of regimes on growth. We take Robert Lucas’s macroeconomic model and augment it with regime dynamics identified by Adam Przeworski and colleagues and Torsten Persson and Guido Tabellini, calibrate the model, and show that these dynamics account for the data well.