Tourist Development

Frieden (1795/1991) that the world would see an ever-expanding zone of peace and commercial interaction among free republics. This argument received renewed attention in the 1990s, as a series of studies made use of structured historical data and statistical methods to test a set of hypotheses common-ly referred to as the liberal peace:1 • Pairs of democratic states are much more successful in maintaining peaceful rela-tions than pairs that include at least one non-democratic state • States that trade extensively with each other will have less war than pairs of states without such relations • Democracies are more peaceful internally than other regime types. In this article, I review a set of studies to show that the liberal peace hypotheses have empirical support, but the finding is robust only for the developed world. Democratic states are more peaceful mainly where citizens are well-informed and able to effectively constrain governments, and where the insti-tutions are well established and not at risk of collapse. These conditions are satisfied mostly in developed countries. States tha