Although very limited historical information exists about state-sponsored murder over the centuries, R. J. Rummel has estimated the number of people murdered by country over time. 10 This study uses his data, reworked to obtain an estimate of state-sponsored murder by century. Undoubtedly, the reliability of the data deteriorates the further back one goes in time. Nevertheless, the results indicate the relative scale of democide over the centuries.

Presumably, a decline in the tempo of government-sponsored murder can be taken as an index of an upward trend in civilized behavior. For example, governments murdered about 32.2 million in the 13th century, when the world population was about 360 million. Thus the fraction of the population killed by governments in the 13th century was about 8.9 percent. Gunpowder was not yet available, and presumably killing with cruder weapons was more troublesome. In the 17th century, about 25.6 million were murdered by their governments, representing about 4.7 percent of the population. In the 19th century, when guns were highly developed and widely dispersed, about 44.4 million were killed by their governments, representing about 3.7 percent of the world's population. A resurgence of brutality occurred in the 20th century, raising the overall democide rate to 7.3 percent of the world's population. But this is mainly due to the domestic terror of the Communists and the genocide of Nazi Germany. [See Figure II]

If the murders by the Communist states are subtracted from the total, about 59 million were murdered in this century. Thus state-sponsored killing in the noncommunist world (including the more than 16 million killed by Germany) was about 3.6 percent of the population. On the whole, although the evidence is very crude, it appears that as per capita incomes have risen with industrialization, the relative incidence of democide has declined.

Humans prefer to dominate rather than be dominated. They also tend to distrust and dislike people who are different. These traits often manifest themselves in government, either as official government policy or by toleration of antipathy. The extreme expression of antipathy is murder; its less pernicious expression is discrimination. Civilized societies are committed to the rule of law, which constrains the scale and scope of domination and punishes illegal acts, but the rule of law is not widespread. 11 Apart from moral considerations, enmity has economic implications. The extent to which discrimination is practiced depends on its cost to the discriminator, including its legal repercussions.

Among groups of equal productivity, the majority group usually has higher per capita income than minority groups. 12 The majority group usually gains this advantage through discrimination, which transfers income from the minority and is a form of rent seeking. The majority resists any rule or policy change that limits discrimination, since it lowers their relative income.

Among authoritarian states, domination and rent seeking by one group over another are often associated with restrictions on occupational choice, denial of educational opportunities, preferences in the licensing of trade, confiscation of land, nationalization of business, restrictions on property ownership and exchange, mobility restrictions and so on. The dominant group has an obvious vested interest in maintaining these sanctioned restrictions. For example, holders of large tracts of land in Asia and Latin America resist peasant pressure for land redistribution and often control governments. Politicians also benefit from maintaining domination; bribery and corruption are endemic throughout the less-developed world and exist in some advanced nations as well.

Thus part of the motivation for maintaining rule is to protect the rent-seeking capacity of the dominant group. Politicians extract a fee for "renting" the coercive power of the state to that group. The aggregate size of these rents is largely unknown. In one case, it has been estimated that licensed trade in India and Turkey generated rents of about 7.3 and 15 percent of national income, respectively. 13 The size of the rulers' fees also is unknown. Anecdotal evidence suggests that some, including Batista, Peron, Marcos, Duvalier and Mobutu, have extracted many millions of dollars.

Measuring the amount of rent seeking in a society is difficult in part because measuring the size and scope of rent-seeking activity is difficult. It also is hard to measure the potential national income lost because special interests capture the trade. For example, in measuring the value of trade licensing, one can compare the prices and volumes of imports under license with what they would be under free trade. But for every winner in the rent-seeking game, many others seek government favor by devoting resources to acquiring it but are unsuccessful. 14 Those resources are wasted. They could have been employed in private, productive activity. Some fraction of GDP is not produced as a result of that rent-seeking activity. Where rent seeking is on a grand scale, the lost GDP may be quite large. Thus the rent-seeking losses associated with trade restrictions and other market restrictions ought to include the value of the resources withdrawn from private, productive activity.

My purpose here is to estimate the rents associated with democide. It is quite impossible to know the value (not necessarily pecuniary) of those activities to the officials who have practiced it. But it is possible to crudely calculate lost national output arising from democide. Democide makes life and property insecure and lowers the rate of savings. Reduced capital formation lowers the rate of economic growth. I hypothesize that the path of per capita income in nations that practice democide is below the path of income in nations that do not engage in it. By comparing the divergent paths of per capita income, I estimate the order of magnitude of this form of rent-seeking activity.

The relationship between the rate of growth of real per capita income (gy = growth rate of output per head) and the savings rate (gk) is shown in Figure III. At high (or low) rates of saving, the growth rate is higher (or lower). [For calculation of the growth paths, see the Technical Appendix]

Figure IV illustrates the path of per capita income, yt, over time. It is drawn as a nonlinear function to reflect diminishing returns. Thus growth rates are higher at low levels of per capita income than at high levels.

If some outside shock to the savings rate occurs, such as might arise with democide, the lower savings rate switches the growth path of the economy to a lower level. The time that elapses before the economy returns to its original growth path depends on the circumstances and psychology of the people whose behavior was altered by democide.

For example, consider the evolution of the path of real GDP per capita in the Philippines from 1960 to 1990, as shown in Figure V. From 1950 to 1972, the economy grew at a per capita compound rate of 2.9 percent per annum. Ferdinand Marcos was elected president in 1965 and reelected in 1969. Facing mandatory retirement in 1973, in September 1972 he declared martial law and suspended the constitution. He lifted martial law in January 1981 but continued to rule by decree. From 1973 to Marcos's demise in 1986, the Philippine economy did not grow. The growth rate averaged -3.0 percent from 1982-86 as the Marcos regime practiced more violence to stay in power. Marcos won the fraudulent 1986 election, but the population rioted and the military eventually backed Corazon Aquino. There were about a half-dozen attempts to topple the Aquino government, but state-sponsored killing stopped and the economy turned upward. The average annual real per capita growth from 1987 to 1990 was 3.6 percent.

In principle, the rent-seeking losses associated with the democide of the Marcos regime can be calculated by comparing the evolution of the economy before and after the democide with its path during the killing. But that comparison would be dubious. Politics has long been violent and dangerous in the Philippines. Political murder is not an infrequent event. We do not know whether the path of per capita income prior to the democide of the Marcos regime was free of political uncertainty or whether the people fully recovered from it after Marcos was overthrown. A better comparison would be with the growth path of countries that were broadly similar to the Philippines in political and economic development but have not experienced democide.