t coast of Nicaragua. “[O]ne of the prime purposes of thus making the [east coast]‘s head an appoint of the central government is to overcome the centrifugal influence of difficult transportation and so to furnish a federal or national “safety-first…”. After some further exposition, where he looks at a geographic-taxation nexus, Williams looks at corruption:
From this same geography of isolation there follows another factor which causes discontent and instability not only in Bluefields and on the coast, but in many other isolated parts of the almost roadless nation. His usual remoteness from the capital not only permits but practically forces the Commandante or district governor to demonstrate the absolutism of a Spanish regent, rather than the leadership of a republic’s civil servant. All the difficulties of the jungle forbid his getting daily orders, just as they make extremely unlikely any sort of check-up of his actions by the distant federal powers which appointed him. The natural result is that every province is likely to feel — and fell in proportion to the square of the distance — the pressure of the Commandante’s belief that his services are wroth considerably more than his regular monthly salary.
An inspiration for this paper is a comment made by Ricardo Hausmann in 2001. While outlining his theory of latitude dependency in development, Hausmann notes:
Nations with populations far from a coastline also tend to be poorer and show lower rates of economic growth than coastal countries. A country whose population is farther than 100 kilometers from the sea grows 0.6 percent slower per year than nations in which the entire population is within 100 kilometers of the coast. That means, for example that the post-Soviet republics will experience as much difficulty battling their geographical disadvantages as they will overcoming the aftereffects of communism…
This study will look at the absence of sea borders, or being landlocked, instead of the more precise measure of distance from a coastline. However, the theory is the same: lack of access to the ocean retards commercial interchange with the rest of the world, slowing growth and reducing a population’s exposure to political norms such as democracy.
While looking at earlier research on the development of Democracy, Midlarsky (1995) highlights the importance of sea-borders on the development of democracy. These reasons are relevant, because they point to problems that states without sea-borders, those that are landlocked, would have. Midlarsky relates that an earlier quantitative study has demonstrates that democratic outliers, that is “those countries least well explained by domestic variables” were highly connected to the sea. States like Sri Lanka, Jamaica, Ireland, and Greece were much more democratic than predicted by existing models. However, these same states were islands (and so the opposite of land-locked) or peninsulas.
Another argument is that sea borders minimize the threat of war. That is, the more land borders a country has the more its chances of war are maximized (Starr and Most 1978). Summarizing the first study that found this, Lewis Richardson‘s Statistics of Deadly Quarrels, Starr and Most explain:
Although Richardson reports a positive association between borders and war and eventually concludes that the relationship operates from frontiers toward war, he fails to develop explicit hypotheses or a theoretical explanation about why this relationship should be expected to exist. And an explicit level, however, Richardson’s argument appears to develop in two stages. First, he conceptualizes frontiers as creating opportunities for internation interaction. Quite simply, nations with large numbers of borders have greater opportunities for interacting with other countries than those countries which have only a few borders. Going a step further, Richardson then draws an analogy between war and murder. Asking why nationals tend to slay each other rather than foreigners, he concludes that the explanation lies in the very simple fact that nationals have few co