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Prospects for democracy in Iraq should be assessed in light of the historical precedents of nations with comparable political experiences. Saddam Hussein's Iraq was an unusually extreme autocracy, which lasted an unusually long time. Since the end of the nineteenth century, only thirty nations have experienced an autocracy as extreme as Iraq's for a period exceeding two decades. The subsequent political experience of those nations offers a pessimistic forecast for Iraq and similar nations. Only seven of the thirty are now democratic, and only two of them have become established democracies; the democratic experiments in the other five are still in progress. Among the seven, the average time required to transit the path from extreme autocracy to coherent, albeit precarious, democracy has been fifty years, and only two have managed this transition in fewer than twenty-five years. Even this sober assessment is probably too optimistic, because Iraq lacks the structural conditions that theory and evidence indicate have been necessary for successful democratic transitions in the past. Thus, the odds of Iraq achieving democracy in the next quarter century are close to zero, at best about two in thirty, but probably far less.

Investigates the interrelatedness of trade & deficit in relation to of the North-South divide. A review of the briefly compares the liberal & political economic perspectives on deficits. The comparison of deficit funding by high income countries versus accumulated liabilities in the South supports previous arguments that trade deficits produce Southern dependency. A cross-sectional time series analysis of the variables of interest in 119 countries indicates that trade deficits erase one quarter of the expected convergence between North & South. It is concluded that the North-South divide would narrow if Southern countries avoided trade deficits & prioritized the expansion of trade volume. Tables, Figures, References. J. Harwell