The presence of a state is one of the most reliable historical predictors of social and economic development. In this article, we complete the coding of an extant indicator of state presence from 3500 BCE forward for almost all but the smallest countries of the world today. We outline a theoretical framework where accumulated state experience increases aggregate productivity in individual countries but where newer or relatively inexperienced states can reach a higher productivity maximum by learning from the experience of older states. The predicted pattern of comparative development is tested in an empirical analysis where we introduce our extended state history variable. Our key finding is that the current level of economic development across countries has a hump-shaped relationship with accumulated state history.

中文翻译：

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国家历史与经济发展：六千年的证据

国家的存在是社会和经济发展的最可靠的历史预测指标之一。在本文中，我们完成了从公元前3500年开始对几乎世界上所有最小国家/地区的现存状态指示器的编码。我们概述了一个理论框架，在该框架中，积累的州经验可以提高各个国家的总生产率，而在较新的或相对缺乏经验的州中，可以通过学习较早的州的经验来达到更高的最高生产率。比较发展的预测模式在经验分析中进行了检验，我们引入了扩展状态历史变量。我们的主要发现是，当前各国经济发展水平与累积的州历史有着驼峰形的关系。