Civic Freedom & Socioeconomic Development Nexus

A country-panel study testing whether civic freedom acts as a leading indicator of socioeconomic development — pooling CIVICUS Monitor and V-Dem civil-liberties scores against the UN Human Development Index, the Multidimensional Poverty Index, and UN SDG progress indicators. The test itself is two-stage: time-lagged correlation between civic-freedom scores and outcomes at 5-, 10-, and 15-year horizons, followed by a country-and-year fixed-effects panel regression controlling for GDP per capita, region, and starting conditions — so any leading-indicator claim has to survive basic confounding, not just a raw correlation. Restarted in September 2026 as a clean rebuild after the original analysis was tangled up with a different project's repo; currently building the ETL pipeline that extracts and merges five source datasets (CIVICUS, V-Dem, HDR/MPI, WDI, UN SDG) into one tidy country-year panel — reconciling three incompatible country-code schemes (ISO3, V-Dem's own codes, and the UN's M49) is the current data-quality validation step, done before modeling begins.