Judicial Performance and its Determinants: A Cross-Country Perspective

Abstract

Well functioning judiciaries are key to economic development. Combining existing information with a newly collected dataset, the paper provides cross-country comparisons of measures of judicial performance, and investigates how cross-country differences in trial length are related to the underlying characteristics of judicial systems. There is a large cross-country variation in trial length across all instances, which appears to be related to the share of the justice budget devoted to computerisation, the systematic production of statistics, the active management of the progress of cases, the presence of specialized commercial courts and the managerial responsibilities assigned to the chief judge. Good quality regulations is associated with lower litigation, which in turn can shorten trial length. Free negotiation of lawyers' fees also appears to be associated with lower litigation.