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In contrast to comparative economic studies concentrating on gross national & per capita income, a new approach is presented stressing per capita consumption. Personal expenditures are classified as primary (food, clothing, & shelter), secondary (education, transportation), & luxury. Data from Brazil, El Salvador, the Ivory Coast, Italy, the Netherlands, the Philippines, Portugal, Sierra Leone, South Korea, Tanzania, & the US are used to derive an index of consumption inequality, the validity of which is established by a cross-sectional design. 3 Tables, 3 Figures, 2 Appendixes, 22 References. M. Meeks

Most theorists on international relations agree on recognizing natural resources, economic strength, technological development, political stability, & military strength as the five bases of a state's power. This unanimity is in sharp contrast with the divergences in the operationalizations of the power of states. Most operationalizations use only one or two bases of a state's power & thus are very limited in scope. Therefore, the demand for an operationalization sticking as closely as possible to the unanimity among theorists forces itself on the researcher. An attempt is made to transform the theoretical unanimity into an operational measure. Each power basis represented by partial indicators is listed: (1) natural resources--area, population, production of energy, (2) economic strength--gross national product, energy consumption, monetary stability, (3) technological development--level of alphabetization, number of students in higher education, scientific production & infrastructure, (4) political stability--length of independence, internal stability, & (5) military strength--number of men in the armed forces, conventional weapons, nuclear strength. The operationalization was obtained by granting all five power bases an equal share in the index & by giving an equal weight to the sums of the arithmetical values for fifteen partial indicators & thus, for the five indicators. The nation's power-index, thus obtained, was applied to 110 nation states as they existed at the beginning of the '70s. On this power scale, ratings differ from 29,046 indexpoints of world power (IWM) for the US to 276 IWM for Gambia & even less for a number of the smaller states that could not be investigated. Modified HA.