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World Power Trends and International Relations: Measuring Power with an Entropy-QAP Approach

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Abstract

National power has been an important discriminative signal for the evolution of great power competition and international patterns in recent years, not only in terms of the relative resource scale of the state but also in terms of the efficiency of resource use. Based on the two levels of national resources and conversion mechanisms, this article uses the entropy method to establish national power comprehensive assessment index systems covering 144 countries and 38 indicators from 1990–2020. At the same time, based on power transition theory (PTT), this article uses quadratic assignment procedures to verify the relevance and interpretation of international bilateral relations in the national power gap. The conclusion is that technology and economic elements are especially important for national power, and the conversion mechanism is icing on the cake rather than a decisive factor. The competition among great powers is transformed into nontraditional competition rather than an arms race; the international pattern has gradually developed from one superpower to a multipolar trend, and the global economic and geopolitical center has transitioned to Asia. The rise of China and the recession in the U.S. are factual; as the gap between the two countries’ power narrows, their international relations become increasingly tense, confirming power transition theory.

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Data Availability

The data are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Notes

  1. The Composite Index of National Capability is proposed in 1963 by David Singer. It consists of six dimension of steel production, military spending, military personnel, energy consumption, total population and urban population. It is the standard of comprehensive strength in one country biased toward the measurement of material strength.

  2. Calculated as in Bailey Michael A., Anton Strezhnev and Erik Voeten, "Estimating dynamic state preferences from United Nations voting data," Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 61, No. 2, 2017, pp. 430–456.

  3. The article defines asymmetric relationship as the relationship between countries with more than 20% difference in capacity, symmetric as the difference in capacity less than 20%, and overtaking when the capacity of one country catches up with the other country in a symmetric relationship.

  4. In this article, robust test was also conducted by comparing with GDP; the results are stable but not shown in the text due to the word limit.

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Acknowledgements

This work is supported by Strategic Economy Interdisciplinarity (Beijing Universities Advanced Disciplines Initiative, No. GJJ2019163), and Social Science Foundation of Beijing (22JJB011).

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  1. Institute of Defense Economics and Management, Central University of Finance and Economics, Beijing, China

    Xin-Yi Wang & Bo Chen

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Wang, XY., Chen, B. World Power Trends and International Relations: Measuring Power with an Entropy-QAP Approach. J OF CHIN POLIT SCI (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11366-023-09853-3

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