The Superpowers Alignment Tax
Estimates the economic cost or gain of great-power alignment choices for African states. The model builds alignment signals, maps economic dependency and decomposes a chosen posture across thirteen gain and loss channels with behavioural adjustments and uncertainty bounds.
What the model examines
What economic price does an African state incur or avoid when it adopts a great-power alignment posture during a crisis?
How the model is structured
UN General Assembly agreement rates and five coded diplomatic signals form the alignment measure. A channel-decomposed calculation adjusts gains and costs through commitment credibility, domestic audience costs and lock-in risk. A prospect-theory layer applies loss aversion while documented AGOA episodes provide event-study calibration with bootstrapped intervals.
What this model is built to test
- Three-dimensional African alignment landscape
- UN voting and diplomatic-signal coding
- Economic-dependency radar
- Alignment Tax Calculator
- Thirteen-channel waterfall
- Prospect-theory panel
- Historical precedent timeline
- Analyst Workbench and reports
Decision controls
- Country
- Alignment posture
- Crisis type and severity
- Power-response intensity
- Time horizon
- Opposition strength
- Previous alignment depth
- Institutional entanglement
- UN voting metric and reference year
Analytical returns
- Net alignment tax
- Gross gains and costs
- Uncertainty bounds
- Thirteen-channel waterfall
- Cross-posture comparison
- Behavioural multipliers and prospect value
- Historical precedent analysis
- Country dependency profile
- CSV and Excel reports
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