This is the first of a two-part series focusing on the symbiotic relationship between politics and economics, with existing literature focusing more on domestic policies premised on globalization representative of a unipolar US-led world rather than taking account of the evolving multipolar world.

The second part will detail the focus of our cabinet members on domestic factors as the root cause of the economy’s fragility while ignoring external factors with a considerably greater impact on our domestic economic policies.

There is a symbiotic liaison between economics and politics with markedly differing gradations of affiliation depending on the ruling elite’s target/preferred group - their constituents/stakeholders in a democracy/hybrid system, the institutional elite in autocracies, the religious groups in a theocracy or the party apparatchik in communism - all operating within a psychologically determined range of welfare data - poverty, inflation and unemployment - deemed acceptable.

There is, however, a dearth of empirical studies on this relationship. Thirteen years ago an International Monetary Fund Working Paper 11/12 (January 2011) titled How Does Political Instability Affect Economic Growth? by Ari Aisen and Francisco Jose Veiga concluded that “political instability significantly reduces economic growth, both statistically and economically…..Using a dataset covering up to 169 countries in the period between 1960 and 2004, estimates from system-GMM (generalized method of moments) regressions show that political instability is particularly harmful through its adverse effects on total factor productivity growth and, in a lesser scale, by discouraging physical and human capital accumulation…..Our results suggest that........

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