What is this concept of which you speak?

I mean the concept of "economic power." I hear it tossed around quite a bit, but I've never encountered even one piece of writing of any sort (be it journalistic, academic, or whatever) that would do both things that are necessary to make a concept useful: 1) define it and 2) operationalize it (i.e. show ways of measuring and/or comparing it). There's a lot of authors who can't even define it; they start off writing about "economic power" but it becomes clear later on that they confuse it with economic prosperity (example here). But most writers don't have problems doing that, which should not be too surprising as the concept is actually fairly easy to define. If power is an ability of one agent to make another agent do something she does not want to do, and/or not do something that she wants to do, then economic power is just that, using economic means.

But, just because it's easy to define doesn't mean it's easy to use. Everything I've ever read that talks about economic power talks about it as though it weren't even necessary to operationalize it because how it works is just obvious. I suspect this is because there is an easy (and false) analogy between economic power and military power. It's pretty straightforward to see how military power works (if you have the ability to keep blowing up lots of stuff for a prolonged period of time, those who own stuff you're blowing up will eventually bend to your will), and equally straightforward to see how much military power a given country has relative to other countries (you just look at the size of the military and the defense budget). I think lots of people believe that economic power is more or less like military power in that respect, so that it's enough to look at, say, a country's GDP or its natural resources endowment to decide how "economically powerful" it is. But that's not how things are, really. How does one country force another to do something through economic means? It's much more complex and nuanced than warfare. You can impose a trade embargo, for example. Whatever economic power is, the US is clearly the most powerful country in the world in this way. It could feasibly impose a trade embargo on, say, Indonesia, if it wanted Indonesia to act a certain way. But it couldn't possibly do it to Canada; Canada consumes 16% of our exports, and we buy 20% of our imports from Canada, so stopping trade with Canada would cause in the US a recession of truly monstrous proportions. It wouldn't be a credible threat. You could conceivably bribe governments to enact policies that you like--but that you can only do in dictatorships (because they're effectively governed by a relatively small number of people; democracies are too expensive to bribe). Or take natural resources. Can Saudi Arabia blackmail us into doing something by threatening to cut us off from their oil? Not really; if we can't buy their oil, they won't be able to sell as much of it. They'll impoverish themselves.

As another illustration of how very much non-straightforward the notion is, think about Poland and The Netherlands. Both countries have almost exactly the same GDP. Which one has more economic power--and why?

To sum up, I'm not saying that economic power is a meaningless concept. It's not; there's definitely such a thing as economic power. But it's meaningless to talk about it without operationalizing it first, and so far I haven't seen anyone do that. Maybe I just haven't seen enough, so if any of my readers has a source to prove me wrong, please share.