Capitalist countries have 0.1% chance of going to war
Gartzke ’07 [Erick; 2007; Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center for Peace and Security Studies (cPASS) at the University of California, San Diego; The Capitalist Peace; “Economic Development,” p. 179-180] SPark
How many wars occur between "capitalist" countries? It is not obvious how to condense the bundle of factors discussed above into a single variable. Still, IMF FIN. OPEN. (Low) is probably the best candidate for such a test. Let me arbitrarily define capitalist dyads as those where the lower IMF FIN. OPEN score is at least six. This is the closest ordinal value on the scale to a value at least two standard deviations above the mean (3.006 + 2 x (1.627) = 6.26). It also produces a subsample of capitalist dyads that is about 6.9% of the available sample of observations, not much different from that for democratic dyads (R = 0.1491 for the two dummy variables). Interestingly, there are no wars in the capitalistdyads either, though the smaller sample of cases for which data on financial openness are available means that only about a quarter of the wars are accounted for in the sample (54 wars, x 2 = 4.0, Pr= 0.045). To extend this very crude test a bit further, I add zeros to round out missing observations so that the capitalist and democracy samples are the same size and all 222 wars appear in the sample. When I do this, the capitalist dyads again contain no wars and the relationship is highly significant (0.1%). Thus, both democracies and capitalist dyads appear never to fight wars. Still, determining more about these relation-ships, and their relative impact on war, requires that we move beyond cross tabs.
Development prevents war - increased deterrence and lower gains from conflicts ensure peaceful relationships **
