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Welcome to Doug Gibler's International Politics Blog! This blog serves to familiarize students with both contemporary and historical events mentioned in class. I'll do my best to keep the posts current with class, but please feel free to let me know if you think the blog is missing coverage of something. Enjoy!
5 comments:
On computing the CINC, why is such high consideration given to such specific factors? For example, why is steel and fuel consumption so important, while excluding other important factors,like overall GNP? Also, why is urban population and overall popultatin included, yet excluding rural population (being close in numbers to the urban pop.)?
Using steel and iron production allows the model to go back to around 1816 (I think). GNP and GDP weren't measured until the 1920's for a few countries and after WWII for most others. GNP and CINC have a strong and positive relationship.
Lastly, whether you include rural or urban -- aren't you including both (pop - urban = rural or visa versa)? You can either measure the % of rural or urban. Maybe I'm missing something....
To clarify, I mean that in a sense you are including both by measuring one (urban). You would get the same result if you measured rural instead of urban, or if you measure both rural and urban because there are only two choices. Measuring "urban" makes sense because it insinuates a level of economic development.
My question concerns the text's inability to instantiate why it opted to include urban population to count as 1/6th of the calculation, while excluding the rural population; after all, the rural population of the world has always comprised the majority of the world's population up until this year, 2007.
It might make more sense that it included the urban over rural region in the index because, perhaps, urban residents can be mobilized faster and more efficiently; nevertheless, the book does not provide the reasoning behind the index's mere inclusion of the urbanites.
However, including the urban population in such a calculation doesn't entail economic development in any such country. A lot of people can live in an "urban" area, while that area is relatively economically underdeveloped.
Lastly, including a country's urban population percentage (in relation to that of the world) doesn't (i think) include the rural population too. The total population and urban population are calculated separately, giving points to each category, as if they are unrelated. If there are any statistics majors out there, feel free to chime in. thanks for the response
For some crazy reason I thought that the measure of rural and urban population was on a percentage of population (of respective country) basis. I thought they only used actual numbers for overall population. It obviously makes sense that they use actual numbers for both measurements, though. So they use urban pop to show the quality of manpower, which is something I included in the term "economic development". I guess you could say "technical development" instead of "economic development." However, urban migration does correlate with economic development. Urban areas produce a much, much larger percentage of a country's GDP on a per capita basis. Like you said, it's all relative. I was not saying that urban populations are wealthy in American terms, necessarily. Just more productive. If you take the urban areas of ANY country and compare it to that country's rural areas, the urban area is more economically developed and consists of a population that is more productive and educated.
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