State capacity

Extracted Attributes

• Distinction

  Distinct from political control, which refers to tactics states use to gain societal compliance.

• Core Definition

  A government's ability to accomplish policy goals, including tax collection, law enforcement, and public goods provision.

• Measurement Indexes

  Government effectiveness index, government competitiveness index, and the State Capacity Index by Jonathan Hanson and Rachel Sigman.

• Economic Correlation

  Strongly linked to long-term economic development.

• Measurement Examples

  Ability to tax, provide public goods, enforce property rights, achieve economic growth, or hold a monopoly on the use of force within a territory.

• Key Functions Enabled

  Establishment of law and order, protection of private property rights, national defense, competitive markets, transportation infrastructure, and mass education.

• Impact of Low Capacity

  Leads to a state being defined as fragile or, in extreme cases, failed.

• Technical Capabilities

  Bureaucratic power, informational capacity, and coercive capacity.

Timeline

• Michael Mann defined state capacity as the state's ability to attain its intended policy goals. (Source: Yuhua Wang PDF)

  1986

State capacity

State capacity is the ability of a government to accomplish policy goals, either generally or in reference to specific aims. More narrowly, state capacity often refers to the ability of a state to collect taxes, enforce law and order, and provide public goods. A state that lacks capacity is defined as a fragile state or, in a more extreme case, a failed state. Higher state capacity has been strongly linked to long-term economic development, as state capacity can establish law and order, private property rights, and external defense, as well as support development by establishing a competitive market, transportation infrastructure, and mass education.

Web Search Results

• State capacity - Wikipedia

  Wikipedia The Free Encyclopedia ## Contents # State capacity State capacity is the ability of a government to accomplish policy goals, either generally or in reference to specific aims. More narrowly, state capacity often refers to the ability of a state to collect taxes, enforce law and order, and provide public goods. [...] There are multiple dimensions of state capacity, as well as varied indicators of state capacity. In studies that use state capacity as a causal variable, it has frequently been measured as the ability to tax, provide public goods, enforce property rights, achieve economic growth or hold a monopoly on the use of force within a territory. State capacity is distinct from political control, as the latter refers to the tactics that states use to gain compliance from society. [...] State capacity can be measured by indexes such as the government effectiveness index and government competitiveness index. ## State formation State capacity may involve an expansion of the state's information-gathering abilities. In processes of state-building, states began implementing a regular and reliable census, the regular release of statistical yearbooks, and civil and population registers, as well as establishing a government agency tasked with processing statistical information.

• State Capacity - Our World in Data

  Oxford Martin School logo University of Oxford logo Global Change Data Lab logo # State Capacity By: Bastian Herre and Pablo Arriagada State capacity is the ability of governments to effectively implement their policies and achieve their goals. The goals of governments vary a lot, and some governments are much more ambitious than others. However, they typically include protecting their citizens against internal and external threats and encouraging economic activity. [...] The chart illustrates this by showing the State Capacity Index by researchers Jonathan Hanson and Rachel Sigman. The index aggregates 21 indicators, such as how much countries can control their territory, raise sustainable resources, and hire skilled and impartial security forces and public servants. [...] `@article{owid-state-capacity, author = {Bastian Herre and Pablo Arriagada}, title = {State Capacity}, journal = {Our World in Data}, year = {2023}, note = { }` Our World in Data logo ### Reuse this work freely All visualizations, data, and code produced by Our World in Data are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license. You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce these in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited.

• State capacity: what is it, how we lost it, and how to get it back

  The concept of state capacity – “the ability of a state to collect taxes, enforce law and order, and provide public goods” – was developed by political scientists, economic historians, and development economists to illuminate the strong institutional contrast that parallels the economic contrast between rich and poor countries. Rich countries are all distinguished by having large, strong, and relatively capable states; poor countries, by contrast, are generally characterized by weak and [...] Motivated by this sobering assessment of the current situation, the Niskanen Center is launching a new Project on State Capacity to identify and analyze the key drivers of government dysfunction and propose institutional remedies. Our analysis implicates substantive issues of public policy, but the focus is deeper: the underlying ability of American government to formulate and execute policy in a competent fashion. Read the full paper here. ### Downloadable PDFs ### More in State Capacity [...] Here at the Niskanen Center, we see growing deficits in state capacity over recent decades as a matter of fundamental importance. At stake is not just the prospect for effective public policy in a wide variety of important domains; at this point, the legitimacy and continued vitality of liberal democracy are implicated as well. The fact is, around the world the fortunes of liberal democracy rise and fall with its perceived effectiveness in improving the lives of ordinary people. The economic

• [PDF] State Capacity in Historical Political Economy - Yuhua Wang

  With this denition of the state in hand, we can now characterize what we mean by state capacity. Following Mann (1986), we dene “state capacity” as the state’s ability to attain its intended policy goals, whether they be economic, scal, or otherwise. A state with high capacity is thus more likely to produce the policy outcomes that the government wants than one with low capacity (Brambor, Goenaga, Lindvall, and Teorell 2020). The basic reason is that a high-capacity state has access to [...] greater scal and informational resources that it can exploit to achieve its policy aims.1 A state does not always exploit its full capacity for action. In this respect, state capacity is a latent feature that we do not directly observe (Hanson and Sigman 2021). Scholars can nevertheless employ a range of visible indicators from which historical levels of state capacity can be inferred. These include measures of the state’s ability to extract scal resources and information from society, as [...] Google Scholar WorldCat Downloaded from by OUP-Reference Gratis Access user on 12 November 2022 Notes 1 The conceptualization and measurement of state capacity is the main topic of the recent review by Berwick and Christia (2018). For this reason, we limit our discussion of this topic here. Berwick and Christia organize their framework around three types of state capacity: extraction, coordination, and compliance. For complementary discussions of conceptualizations and measurements, see Soifer

• The origins of state capacity - Broadstreet Blog

  I noted in the post that building state capacity in the short run is inordinately hard because an effective state requires a range of technical capabilities such as bureaucratic power, informational capacity, and coercive capacity. So we often think of state-capacity as a “sticky slow-moving variable” which in turn has given us researchers the license to measure capacity as the outcomes it is expected to shape. For instance, some common measures of state capacity include per capita taxation and [...] per capita GDP. It’s no surprise then that state capacity is used in most studies as a right-hand side variable shaping a range of outcomes notably economic development, public good provision and conflict. [...] This is the problem with HPE (“Historical Political Economy”). To conceptualize the origins of state capacity, an HPE specialist uses a study of state capacity where it already exists: “Francisco Garfias studying Mexico finds that bureaucratic capacity is often dependent on the willingness of nonruling economic elites to cooperate with rulers. When nonruling economic elites threaten to seize power, rulers can be deterred from investing in state capacity essential for a range of functions

State capacity is the ability of a government to accomplish policy goals, either generally or in reference to specific aims. A state that lacks capacity is defined as a fragile state or, in a more extreme case, a failed state. Higher state capacity has been strongly linked to long-term economic development, as state capacity can establish law and order, private property rights, and external defense, as well as support development by establishing a competitive market, transportation infrastructure, and mass education.