Impact of Institutional Factors on Economic Growth in the United States in the Years 1979–2007

The purpose of this article is to isolate and determine the importance of institutional arrangements in shaping the dynamics of the U.S. GDP in the years 1979–2007. The research hypothesis which has been verified here can be summa-rized as follows: institutions in the U.S. economy have a positive influence on economic growth through a significant impact on improving the business environment. Having regard to the division of the economy into institutional areas: economic system, labor market, financial market, education and R&D, the author selected these institutional factors which indicated that the operation could be important for the process of economic growth in the United States, and then measured the impact in the years 1979–2007. To verify the thesis about the impact of institutions on economic growth the author used one of the most popular tools in this kind of econometric research – the multiple regression analysis. The analysis revealed that during the period of all the analyzed institutional factors it was the proportion of the working population and the degree of unionization that most strongly influenced the economic growth of the United States – an increase in one of these factors was associated with a much more than proportional increase in the rate of the economic growth.