Producing Goods and Projecting Power: How What You Make Influences What You Take

Abstract

How does a state’s source of wealth condition the domain in which it seeks to project influence? We argue that what a state makes conditions what they take. Specifically, the less states rely on land rents to acquire wealth, the less interested they will be in seeking control over territory and the more interested they will be in securing access to distant markets. We develop and test several observable implications that should follow whether this proposition is true. First, as states become less economically dependent on territory, they should be less likely to fight over territory; second, those states should be more likely to both invest in power projection capabilities and subsequently project power at greater distances. Our findings support our theory. These results are robust across a variety of model specifications that take into account potential confounds, such as regime type, economic development, threat, and geography.

Ships over Troubled Waters: Examining Naval Development in Asia

“…3 Further economic explanations focus on development rather than just economic resources. Markowitz et al (2019) argue that as a state's economy develops, its sources of wealth change. In particular, states become less dependent on land rents and shift their attention to overseas economic opportunities.…”

“…Here, Ln GDP represents the natural log of a state's GDP using data from the World Bank (2020). Markowitz et al (2019) make the argument that states less focused on land rents will support the development of naval might to protect overseas rents. They use energy consumption per capita as their measure of state economic interest.…”

“…First, energy consumption has a positive and statistically significant impact on naval development regardless of model selection. As Markowitz et al (2019) argue, economies that become more outward-looking are more likely to engage in naval development. The finding for energy consumption offers support for this line of argument.…”

New Estimates of Over 500 Years of Historic GDP and Population Data

“…To date, the relationships between economic development and democratization, repression, or conflict have not been estimated with complete cross-national data prior to 1950. Scholars have instead relied on proxy-measures such as energy consumption percapita (e.g., Markowitz, McMahon and Fariss, 2019), shipping and rail costs (e.g., Lake, 2009;Markowitz and Fariss, 2013), or simple linear interpolation of GDP per-capita (e.g., Treisman, 2020) to account for long-term economic variation. The new estimates we present in this article allow researchers to evaluate whether these empirical relationships are limited to the post-1950 period, or whether they generalize to earlier time periods (using more precise data with better coverage).…”

New Estimates of Over 500 Years of Historic GDP and Population Data

“…To date, the relationships between economic development and democratization, repression, or conflict have not been estimated with complete cross-national data prior to 1950. Scholars have instead relied on proxy-measures such as energy consumption percapita (e.g., Markowitz, McMahon and Fariss, 2019), shipping and rail costs (e.g., Lake, 2009;Markowitz and Fariss, 2013), or simple linear interpolation of GDP per-capita (e.g., Treisman, 2020) to account for long-term economic variation. The new estimates we present in this article allow researchers to evaluate whether these empirical relationships are limited to the post-1950 period, or whether they generalize to earlier time periods (using more precise data with better coverage).…”