Quarterly Journal of Political Science > Vol 12 > Issue 4

Order, Distance, and Local Development over the Long-Run

Jan Pierskalla, Ohio State University, USA, Anna Schultz, Duke University, USA, Erik Wibbels, Duke University, USA, ew41@duke.edu
 
Suggested Citation
Jan Pierskalla, Anna Schultz and Erik Wibbels (2017), "Order, Distance, and Local Development over the Long-Run", Quarterly Journal of Political Science: Vol. 12: No. 4, pp 375-404. http://dx.doi.org/10.1561/100.00016020

Publication Date: 07 Dec 2017
© 2017 J. Pierskalla, A. Schultz and E. Wibbels
 
Subjects
Law and Economics,  Public Economics:Internal Taxation,  Comparative political economy,  Comparative politics,  International political economy,  Political economy,  Political history,  Rule of law
 
Keywords
DevelopmentGovernanceCapital citiesPolitical economy
 

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In this article:
The Geography of Governance, State Exposure, and Development 
Research Design, Data, and Model Specification 
Results 
Conclusion 
References 

Abstract

We argue that local, long-term exposure to a centralized political authority determines sub-national patterns of contemporary economic development. Older research on economic development has focused on cross-national income accounts, often ignoring the large sub-national variation in income differences. Likewise, research on the effects of political institutions on development has mostly neglected sub-national variation in the institutional environment. Yet a growing body of work shows that the geographic reach of states within countries and their ability to foster economic exchange have varied dramatically through history. We contribute to recent research on sub-national development by creating a new measure of local historical exposure to state institutions that codes geographic distance to historical capital cities and use highly spatially disaggregated data on economic development, based on satellite data, to test their relationship. We find clear evidence, using fixed-effects estimations for both European and global data, that local historical proximity to capital cities is associated with higher levels of economic development. This finding is further substantiated through a number of robustness checks covering alternative measures, specifications, and sensitivity analyses.

DOI:10.1561/100.00016020