State Capacity in Latin America
By Mauricio Cárdenas. 2010
118 citations recorded by the source corpus.
"State capacity is exceptionally low in Latin America, even when compared to other former colonies. This paper analyzes four possible factors that could potentially explain this troubling feature: political inequality, economic inequality, interstate conflict and civil war. With the exception of external war, these variables have a negative effect on state-building in models where the accumulation of state capacity is analogous to investment under uncertainty. These analytical predictions are then tested with cross-country data, paying special attention to Latin America. Democracy´s impact on state capacity is quite positive, as is the effect of the frequency of external wars when data for the last century is used. However, in the data for the last half century, external wars have little effect, but the negative effects of internal wars and income inequality become highly significant. The model explains why Latin America has failed to develop its state, despite the improvement in the various measures of democracy. In fact, both the theoretical model and the empirical evidence suggest that the effects of democracy are undermined in the presence of high economic inequality."
Subfields: Development, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/857f9172ffb7036be04cde16f128b7dac3267ced
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In Development
In Sociology and Political Science
- Torsten Persson
- Timothy J. Besley
- B. Geddes
- L. Cingolani
- Pauline Grosjean
- Jonathan L. Weigel
- Lucie Gadenne
- C. Knutsen
Citations in the corpus
- Taxation and Development (2013, background): “Cárdenas (2010) considers the question empirically,using cross-sectional data for 100 + countries, and finds that political and (especially) economic inequality appears to be associated with lower incentives to invest in state capacity.”
- The State of State Capacity : a review of concepts, evidence and measures (2013, background): “There is a fast growing strand of game-theoretic literature looking at the incentives to invest in state capacity, which partially overlaps with the economic history works on state formation (e.g. Cardenas 2010).”