Institutional insulation resists clean measurement across many countries.

Evidence

It is almost impossible to come up with a undisputable measure of “insulation” for a sample of more than a hundred countries in which institutional arrangements vary on many dimensions. In Table 121 we choose two approximations of insulation. The first one is a simple dichotomy democracy vs. autocracy as the most general approximation for the separation between not insulated 19This effect may be moderated by risk aversion as discussed in section 4. — Philippe Aghion, Alberto Alesina, and Francesco Trebbi, Endogenous Political Institutions, 164

Categorization

• QUESTION: The excerpt ends mid-sentence in the source, so the second approximation of insulation (presumably a finer-grained measure) is left unexplained here and worth chasing in Table 121.