New report : Rule of Law and the Institutional Roots of Economic Performance
Can the global economy survive in a "world without rules"?
At the January 2026 World Economic Forum in Davos, national leaders repeatedly spoke about how the world has become more unpredictable, more fragmented, and harder to govern through shared rules. A stark example is the global uncertainty caused by the US Supreme Court's February 2026 ruling on some presidentially imposed tariffs. In the immediate aftermath, it appeared that the Court's finding of illegality would affect potentially as much as $130bn in tariffs paid by businesses since last year, and cast doubt on major trade deals that had set country-specific tariffs.
For businesses and investors, this signals a shift. Uncertainty increasingly comes from institutions: it is no longer just cyclical or financial.
It is in this context that the Bingham Centre for the Rule of Law and the Law Society of England and Wales have collaborated to commission economics research on the relationship between the rule of law and economic performance.
For a quick introduction to this work, see the comment piece The Rule of Law and the Economy: How the Rules of the Game Enable Prosperity by Dr Jan van Zyl Smit and Dr Julinda Beqiraj of the Bingham Centre and Ian Jeffrey (Chief Executive, Law Society of England and Wales).
The main publication is our commissioned report by economist Dr Laura Lopez-Gomez. In The Rule of Law and the Institutional Roots of Economic Performance, Laura:
- examines the micro- and macroeconomic impact of the rule of law, the empirical evidence of its long-term effects on growth, and the interplay between rule of law and other institutional factors including corruption control, bureaucratic effectiveness, democracy, human rights and informal institutions.
- reviews a global evidence base, including the debate about the role of legal institutions in China's economic growth in recent decades, and
- includes a case study of how the legal system of England and Wales has influenced centuries of economic development in our own jurisdiction, from the medieval period through the industrial revolution to the present day.
