For the sake of comparison, Table 1 displays the results for simple cross-sectional
time-series models of economic performance rather than crises, where performance
is simply measured as annual performance on each of the economic dependent
variables. The most important observation to make about these results is that with
the exception of the inflation model, very few of the political indicators have a
significant relationship with performance. This finding is broadly consistent with the
work of Easterly (2005) and others showing that policies have a limited effect on
year-on-year economic performance. That the factors conditioning ups and downs in
the business cycle are quite different than those impacting the propensity for crisis
events becomes immediately clear when comparing these results to those in Table 2.