State Capacity Research Articles

Процессуальность и относительность как аспекты методологии исследования национальной конкурентоспособности

In the discourse surrounding national competitiveness, there exists a need for a comprehensive methodology that transcends conventional approaches. This article proposes an authorial methodology for studying issues of national competitiveness, based on the analysis of criticism directed towards the productivity-based approach and the factor-based approach to assessing national competitiveness. The methodology delineates two aspects: procedural and relative, each characterizing distinct dimensions of a state’s competitive standing in the global economic landscape. The procedural aspect pertains to the degree of state involvement and its role in global economic processes, while the relative aspect is associated with a state's capacity to convert internal and attracted resources into tangible achievements within the structure of the global economy and world trade. Despite potential discrepancies between the two aspects, they are deeply interrelated, forming a cohesive framework for understanding and assessing national competitiveness. In conclusion, this article underscores the importance of adopting a multifaceted approach to studying national competitiveness. By recognizing the procedural and relative dimensions, researchers can gain deeper insights into the complexities of global economic dynamics and inform policy decisions accordingly. Future research endeavors should explore empirical applications of the proposed methodology across diverse national contexts. Additionally, comparative studies could shed light on the differential impacts of procedural and relative factors on national competitiveness outcomes.

Ab initio determination of melting and sound velocity of neon up to the deep interior of the Earth.

The thermophysical properties and elemental abundances of the noble gases in terrestrial materials can provide unique insights into the Earth's evolution and mantle dynamics. Here, we perform extensive abinitio molecular dynamics simulations to determine the melting temperature and sound velocity of neon up to 370GPa and 7500K to constrain its physical state and storage capacity, together with to reveal its implications for the deep interior of the Earth. It is found that solid neon can exist stably under the lower mantle and inner core conditions, and the abnormal melting of neon is not observed under the entire temperature (T) and pressure (P) region inside the Earth owing to its peculiar electronic structure, which is substantially distinct from other heavier noble gases. An inspection of the reduction for sound velocity along the Earth's geotherm evidences that neon can be used as a light element to account for the low-velocity anomaly and density deficit in the deep Earth. A comparison of the pair distribution functions and mean square displacements of MgSiO3-Ne and Fe-Ne alloys further reveals that MgSiO3 has a larger neon storage capacity than the liquid iron under the deep Earth condition, indicating that the lower mantle may be a natural deep noble gas storage reservoir. Our results provide valuable information for studying the fundamental behavior and phase transition of neon in a higher T-P regime, and further enhance our understanding for the interior structure and evolution processes inside the Earth.

Just War and Judgment in Fratelli Tutti

For decades the papal tradition has renounced the term ‘war’ as something around which to build an ethical approach. One can sympathize with this: resort to war seems the consequence of ethical failure and brings in its train a host of brutalities including rape, torture, and murder that harm both victims and perpetrators. But that view of ‘war’ is an incomplete representation of the possibilities of the uses of force to secure legitimate political goods. Thus the popes have struggled to maintain a clear voice in the face of abject tragedies like the Russian invasion of Ukraine: on the one hand, Pope Francis condemns war in an almost absolute manner; on the other, he recognizes the legitimacy of Ukrainian defensive uses of force. In so doing, of course, he merely abides the so-called ‘just war theory’ he seems to have discarded. My contribution will focus on the current state of the just war in Catholic teaching. I will maintain the state remains where it has been since at least the middle of the twentieth century: skeptical about the capacity of states to judge in terms of international law, but cognizant of their right to defend themselves against ongoing aggression.

Beyond the paradigm of uninterrupted expansion of participation: Backing the policy of emancipation from andragogical powers

Participation rate in adult and continuing education (ACE) is one of the multiple indicators of distributive justice. Nonetheless, the literature of recent decades has turned it into a cardinal principle and value. Expansive paradigm that envisages the progressive and generalised development of participation rate in ACE is examined in this article. The aim is to analyse the structure of their argument. Their comparison with Eurostat data on participation and with the results of the RegALE-European Union (EU)-Survey on opinions of local and regional stakeholders is carried out to reach two conclusions. The first concerns the incapacity of Member States to translate expansive paradigm into effective ACE policies. The second one puts forward the theory of the learning exclusion equilibrium as a tool for explaining the reasons for the lack of progress recorded in terms of participation rate in ACE. At the same time, a critical analysis of the political idea of participation rate is performed. Contrasted with the participation objective is a different parameter focused on the individual and social future consequences of the learning processes in which each adult is involved.

US-skepticism and transnational conspiracy in the 2024 Taiwanese presidential election

Taiwan has one of the highest freedom of speech indexes while it also encounters the largest amount of foreign interference due to its contentious history with China. Because of the large influx of misinformation, Taiwan has taken a public crowdsourcing approach to combatting misinformation, using both fact-checking ChatBots and public dataset called CoFacts. Combining CoFacts with large-language models (LLM), we investigated misinformation across three platforms (Line, PTT, and Facebook) during the 2024 Taiwanese presidential elections. We found that most misinformation appears within China-friendly political groups and attacks US-Taiwan relations through visual media like images and videos. A considerable proportion of misinformation does not question U.S. foreign policy directly. Rather, it exaggerates domestic issues in the United States to create a sense of declining U.S. state capacity. Curiously, we found misinformation rhetoric that references conspiracy groups in the West.

Using forced migration to foster emergence? International aid and development policies in Cameroon

Abstract This paper examines the alignment of refugee aid interventions with Cameroon’s national policy of emergence, shedding light on an authoritarian government's utilization of international assistance. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, it investigates how international policies aiming at turning refugees into a development opportunity for their host states are managed by an aid-receiving country and strategically leveraged by Cameroonian authorities to strengthen their political apparatus. It explores how the government integrates humanitarian responses with large-scale development policies, while retaining control over strategic sectors. Implementing the emergence policy enables Cameroon to reappropriate international standards, navigating complex donor relations to establish new legitimacy. The analysis highlights the power dynamics and implications of aid interventions within an authoritarian context, demonstrating the state's capacity to transform internal crises into productive forces. This research contributes to a better understanding of the links between refugee aid, host states’ domestic and international politics, and migration diplomacy.

Impact of next-generation Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) on international relations

The new generation of artificial intelligence technologies occurrence represented by ChatGPT is the beginning of the Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) era. In contrast to the impact of weak AI technologies on international relations discussed in the previous era, AGI is no longer just a tool in the traditional sense. The human-computer integration facilitated by AGI technology will rapidly and deeply penetrate into all areas of social policy and economy. It also may change the mode of social production and economic development, influence international relations and geopolitics by transforming the comprehensive state capacity, and simultaneously force new challenges in global governance. The acknowledgement of a new generation of AGI technological qualitative changes’ impact on future changes in international relations is no longer the fantasy; the underlying AGI changes in labour productivity will certainly lead to a disruptive reconfiguration of future international relations.

Anatomy of a premodern state

Abstract We provide a blueprint for constructing measures of state capacity in premodern states, offering several advantages over the current state of the art. We argue that assessing changing state capacity requires considering the composition of revenues, expenditure patterns, and local-level budgets. As an application, we examine the case of Portugal (1367–1844). Our findings demonstrate that throughout most of this extended period, Portugal maintained comparatively high fiscal and legal capacities. This challenges claims that Portugal’s economic decline from the second half of the eighteenth century was due to low state capacity.

State Capacity and Industrial Development: A Comparative Study of Iran and Egypt (1990–2010)

Despite pursuing industrial development to solve various socioeconomic and sociopolitical issues, such as the urgent need to reconstruct war damages in Iran, the foreign debt crisis in Egypt, and population growth in both countries, statistical data show only slight progress. The graphs of the gross domestic product (GDP) growth and exports of goods and services as a percentage of GDP, which are reliable indexes for measuring industrial output, along with the rate of foreign direct investment, demonstrate numerous fluctuations and instability in the economic growth rate for both cases under the period under review. Failing to diversify the economy, Iran and Egypt still relied heavily on unproductive rents, mostly from hydrocarbon exports, at the end of this era. Why is this the case despite the national leadership putting industrial development on the agenda? This article addresses this question by examining state capacity, focusing on the internal cohesion of state authority and its relation to society. In so doing, comparative historical analysis and causal narrative method are used.

Promoting Social Solidarity Economy in Tunisia: Neoliberal Assumptions and Missed Opportunities Within the Triple Nexus Discourse

ABSTRACT Formally launched by the United Nations (UN) in 2016, the so-called Triple Nexus has been adopted by several international donors that have intervened in Tunisia since the fall of its authoritarian regime. Faced with the state's limited capacity to address critical post-revolutionary challenges such as escalating poverty and radicalisation, external actors – spanning multilateral, bilateral and non-governmental organisations – have endeavoured to tackle humanitarian, development and security issues to promote stability and support the fragile democratisation process in the country. In this context, Social Solidarity Economy (SSE) initiatives have gained prominence as a means to concurrently address diverse challenges associated with the ‘lack of social development’, including marginalisation and the absence of social cohesion – identified as catalysts for radicalisation and instability. In contrast with these stated objectives, fieldwork spanning 2015 to 2019 across various regions of Tunisia reveals that the international donor discourse on SSE, entrenched in a neoliberal approach and government securitisation strategies, exacerbates economic insecurity and amplifies marginalisation.

CD74 supports accumulation and function of regulatory T cells in tumors

Regulatory T cells (Tregs) are plastic cells playing a pivotal role in the maintenance of immune homeostasis. Tregs actively adapt to the microenvironment where they reside; as a consequence, their molecular and functional profiles differ among tissues and pathologies. In tumors, the features acquired by Tregs remains poorly characterized. Here, we observe that human tumor-infiltrating Tregs selectively overexpress CD74, the MHC class II invariant chain. CD74 has been previously described as a regulator of antigen-presenting cell biology, however its function in Tregs remains unknown. CD74 genetic deletion in human primary Tregs reveals that CD74KO Tregs exhibit major defects in the organization of their actin cytoskeleton and intracellular organelles. Additionally, intratumoral CD74KO Tregs show a decreased activation, a drop in Foxp3 expression, a low accumulation in the tumor, and consistently, they are associated with accelerated tumor rejection in preclinical models in female mice. These observations are unique to tumor conditions as, at steady state, CD74KO-Treg phenotype, survival, and suppressive capacity are unaffected in vitro and in vivo. CD74 therefore emerges as a specific regulator of tumor-infiltrating Tregs and as a target to interfere with Treg anti-tumor activity.

Local State Capacity and Uneven Taxation across Industrial Firms

AbstractIn this research we investigate the association between local state capacity (LSC) and effective tax burdens (ETBs) on industrial firms within counties between 1998 and 2013. The LSC measures a state's capacity for policy implementation and specifically its ability to acquire low‐cost agricultural land for nonagricultural (industrial or commercial) purposes. Based on China's government‐led development experience since the 1990s, we draw on two unique household survey datasets to capture LSC at county level. We find robust evidence that greater LSC was associated with much lower ETBs on large industrial firms. This taxation pattern implies local government's primary reliance on larger manufacturing firms, while the ETBs for small‐and‐medium enterprises are not as prominently addressed. This research highlights that LSC can affect both the amount of revenue a local government can generate and the methods it uses to collect these revenues.

Property rights in a weak state: Evidence from land pawning in Qing Taiwan (1683–1895)

AbstractLand pawning is considered inefficient because it causes property rights to be unclearly delineated. Despite this, it once prevailed worldwide. We propose that this system flourished when state capacity was weak and the private sector spontaneously managed public affairs. Local collaboration made it difficult to sell land outright to an outsider who might be an unreliable collaborator. Land pawning granted the pawner's family and neighbours a ‘probation’ period to observe the pawnee's behaviour. If they found the pawnee irresponsible, they could still redeem the land. Data compiled from contracts in Qing Taiwan support our hypothesis.

Will Wealth Weaken Weather Wars?

This study estimates the moderating impact of economic development on climate-conflict linkages during 1989-2019 in Africa, the world region that in recent decades has experienced the most armed conflict. We build a spatially disaggregated dataset that merges multiple decades of georeferenced data on climate shocks and conflict events with both local- and national-level measures of economic development to help shed light on the relative importance of local opportunity costs versus state capacity. We find that higher national GDP per capita greatly dampens the conflict risk associated with higher temperatures, suggesting that enhanced state capacity is a key factor.

Sorption properties of nanostructured ball-milled porous silicon for solid-state hydrogen storage up to 80 bar

Solid-state storage is a feasible solution to store hydrogen compared to commercially available techniques. The disadvantage of using metal and complex hydrides for storage is the elevated temperature operation (>400 °C) and slow reaction kinetics. Porous materials like carbon nanostructures, metal-organic frameworks, zeolites, and porous polymers possess high surface energy and hydrogen affinity. However, cryogenic temperature operation and low storage at ambient conditions are major limitations for practical storage applications. Modifying the material morphology and storage parameters to enhance hydrogen storage is under intense investigation. This study focuses on nanostructuring porous silicon (PS), evaluating its structural characteristics, and investigating its ability to store hydrogen at up to 80 bar. The challenges of large particle size and low-pressure hydrogen storage in the novel porous material is addressed with possible mechanisms. The discussion explored the potential of utilizing interconnected pores via nanoscale engineering and increased charging pressure to optimize hydrogen exposure. Nanostructuring the hand-grinded porous Si (HGPS) reduces crystallite size, boosts surface energy and enhances thermodynamics. At 80 bar and 120 °C, the ball-milled PS (BMPS) exhibits a hydrogen storage capacity of 10.7 wt%. The isosteric heat of adsorption is utilized to optimize storage conditions to achieve useable capacity. The hydrogen adsorption pressure is optimized between 40 and 60 bar, where the storage capacity ranges from 2 wt% and 6 wt% (meeting the hydrogen storage target set by the US Department of Energy). X-ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy investigates surface states and bonding involving silicon hydrides. The effect of nanostructuring on decomposition energy is observed by differential scanning calorimetry. The decreased crystallite size, examined through X-ray diffraction and Raman spectroscopy, exposes nanopores accessible to hydrogen. The accessibility enhances storage capacity in free and surface-affixed states, rendering BMPS for reversible storage applications. The lower temperature requirement for hydrogen adsorption and release from storage material aligns with Sustainable Development Goal 7 (SDG 7) on affordable and clean energy.

Penal state power in Latin America: Cases, concepts and questions for the political sociology of penality

AbstractExamining penality across different regions and periods of time allows us to develop both a robust empirical imaginary and conceptual understanding of the commonalities and variation in how penal state power operates. In this article I elaborate key dimensions of penality in contemporary Latin America. Since the late 20th century, Latin American countries have undergone economic and political transformations with profound effects for the organization of their societies and the features and implications of penal state power. First, I situate research on penal state practices in Latin American countries within the broader dynamics of violence and social conflict across the region. Second, I review scholarship on the relationship between the features of penal state policies and reform in the region and the transformative, procedural and cultural dimensions of democracy. Third, I describe initiatives to expand state capacities to incarcerate criminalized people at an unprecedented scale and clarify the relationship of carceral administration to social order and political legitimacy across Latin America. I then conclude by elaborating how penality in Latin America contributes to our broader understanding of the relationship between penal power, state authority, and inequality; and I highlight three lines of inquiry for future research.

Emerging collaboration amid the COVID-19 within the context of traditional-state dualism governance in Bali.

This study highlights the significant role of traditional governance in enhancing community resilience amid the limitations of state capacity in handling the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite conflicting interests with the state, traditional government plays a crucial role in fostering collective community action to address vulnerabilities. The study underscores the importance of greater involvement of Adat actors in disaster management within the context of dualism in governance, spanning from mitigation planning to preparedness, response and recovery. This involvement has the potential to bolster community resilience.

Financial inclusion and the contested infrastructures of cash transfer payments in South Africa

Across much of the South, digital technologies are increasingly central to the expansion of state social protection systems. Supported by major development agencies, many of these distributive technologies are developed and implemented by financial technology companies with the specific aim of accelerating financial inclusion. While researchers have documented the influence of these financial actors and logics over social policy, we know less about how these interventions are transforming the experience of receiving social protection. Based on qualitative and observational research with social grant recipients in South Africa, this research demonstrates how digital and financial technologies produce confusion, informational opacities and new forms of exclusion among grant recipients. It suggests that the increasingly prominent role of financial technologies in the delivery of social protection undermines state capacity and further entrenches the influence of neoliberal logics over social policy. Finally, the article suggests that these technologies may be transforming the nature of social citizenship in South Africa, undermining efforts to advance universal and redistributive social protection policies.

Impact of Migration on Global Politics and Security

Migration has presented a very important challenge at the global level in recent years, especially with the high economic disparity between countries and regions, wars and crises, and political instability. Even though migration policies and the legal system of asylum are at a solid level for the needs of society, the dilemma is still presented as to whether the flow of migrants affects and determines global politics and security or how this impact is at specific levels, especially at the level of income or economic capacity of regions or states. This is also the basic purpose of this study, where official data from the World Bank and United Nations give concise answers to the impact of the flow of migrants on political stability and global security. It turns out that at the global level, the flow of migrants does not represent a significant challenge in global and security policies, but at lower levels, according to countries, income represents a very significant determinant in political stability as well as Military Expenditure. Generally speaking, migration determines a country’s economic, social, and security image. After the increased migration that includes both refugees and asylum seekers in the last decade as a result of political instability, poverty, Arab Spring and Syrian war and wars in the recent past and the recent war in Ukraine and Israel, the dilemma arises whether migration as a phenomenon (in terms of percentage) has an impact on political stability and security at the world level. This is the basis of this study, which, through statistically valid data from the World Bank and the United Nations, analyzes and generalizes a conclusion about the impact of migration on political stability and security at the global level.

The Role of Trust as a Driver of Private-Provider Participation in Disease Surveillance: Cross-Sectional Survey From Nigeria.

Recognition of the importance of valid, real-time knowledge of infectious disease risk has renewed scrutiny into private providers' intentions, motives, and obstacles to comply with an Integrated Disease Surveillance Response (IDSR) framework. Appreciation of how private providers' attitudes shape their tuberculosis (TB) notification behaviors can yield lessons for the surveillance of emerging pathogens, antibiotic stewardship, and other crucial public health functions. Reciprocal trust among actors and institutions is an understudied part of the "software" of surveillance. We aimed to assess the self-reported knowledge, motivation, barriers, and TB case notification behavior of private health care providers to public health authorities in Lagos, Nigeria. We measured the concordance between self-reported notification, TB cases found in facility records, and actual notifications received. A representative, stratified sample of 278 private health care workers was surveyed on TB notification attitudes, behavior, and perceptions of public health authorities using validated scales. Record reviews were conducted to identify the TB treatment provided and facility case counts were abstracted from the records. Self-reports were triangulated against actual notification behavior for 2016. The complex health system framework was used to identify potential predictors of notification behavior. Noncompliance with the legal obligations to notify infectious diseases was not attributable to a lack of knowledge. Private providers who were uncomfortable notifying TB cases via the IDSR system scored lower on the perceived benevolence subscale of trust. Health care workers who affirmed "always" notifying via IDSR monthly reported higher median trust in the state's public disease control capacity. Although self-reported notification behavior was predicted by age, gender, and positive interaction with public health bodies, the self-report numbers did not tally with actual TB notifications. Providers perceived both risks and benefits to recording and reporting TB cases. To improve private providers' public health behaviors, policy makers need to transcend instrumental and transactional approaches to surveillance to include building trust in public health, simplifying the task, and enhancing the link to improved health. Renewed attention to the "software" of health systems (eg, norms, values, and relationships) is vital to address pandemic threats. Surveys with private providers may overestimate their actual participation in public health surveillance.