The Capitalist Peace

by Don Boudreaux on November 26, 2006

in The Economy, The Profit Motive, Trade

In the forthcoming January 2007 issue of the American Journal of Political Science, Columbia University political scientist Erik Gartzke has a gem of an article.  Its title is  “The Capitalist Peace.”  (It isn’t yet available on-line.)  In this paper, Gartzke refines the argument that he presented in the Economic Freedom of the World: 2005 Annual Report, co-authored with James Gwartney and Robert Lawson.

Here’s the abstract from Gartzke’s forthcoming paper:

It is widely accepted that democracies are less conflict prone, if only with other democracies. Debate persists, however, about the causes underlying liberal peace. This paper offers a contrarian account based on liberal political economy. Economic development, free markets, and similar interstate interests all anticipate a lessening of militarized disputes or wars. This paper shows that this “capitalist peace” subsumes the effect of regime type in standard statistical tests of the democratic peace.

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