Do Modern-Time Wars Make States? Panel Data Evidence

Mauricio Cardenas, Marcela Eslava and Santiago Ramírez

No 11939, Documentos CEDE from Universidad de los Andes, Facultad de Economía, CEDE

Abstract: We re-examine the view that wars make strong states, taking advantage of panel data to address two of the most obvious endogeneity concerns that arise in this context: initial conditions and persistence of state capacity. Our main message is that, in modern times, there is no evidence that wars lead to strong states. In contrast to findings for earlier periods, our results show that external conflicts have displayed a negative correlation with traditional measures of state capacity in recent decades, which becomes insignificant after controlling for initial conditions and the persistence of state capacity. As in previous work, we find a negative capacity- internal conflict correlation, robust to controlling jointly for initial conditions and persistent effects.

Keywords: State capacity; conflict; external war. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H1 H8 O1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 31
Date: 2013-12-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-gro
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:col:000089:011939

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