ABSTRACT
The link between economic accomplishment and power appears to be self-evident. Political and military power are regularly used to protect economic interests, while conversely the tools of political and military power are expensive. Great powers tend to be rich countries, while economic decline tends to lead – albeit with a lag – to political and military decline. However, as the Introduction to this volume emphasizes, the state of understanding about economic and political power remains unsettled on nearly every level. And, as the chapter by Eric M. P. Chiu and Thomas D. Willett makes clear, perhaps most unsettling of all is the lack of consensus on even definitions or principles of measuring power, which often leads the debate back into assertion or even tautology.
