Artificial states are those in which political borders do not coincide with a division of nationalities desired by the people on the ground. We propose and compute for all countries in the world two new measures of the degree to which states are artificial. One is based on measuring how borders split ethnic groups into two separate adjacent countries. The other measures how straight land borders are, under the assumption the straight land borders are more likely to be artificial. We then show that these two measures seem to be highly correlated with several measures of political and economic success.
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Alberto Alesina & William Easterly & Janina Matuszeski, 2006.
"Artificial States,"
NBER Working Papers
12328, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
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William Easterly & Alberto Alesina & Janina Matuszeski, 2006.
"Artificial States,"
Working Papers
100, Center for Global Development.
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References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
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[Downloadable!]
Other versions:
Edward L. Glaeser & Rafael La Porta & Florencio Lopez-de-Silane & Andrei Shleifer, 2004.
"Do Institutions Cause Growth?,"
NBER Working Papers
10568, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
[Downloadable!] (restricted)
Alberto Alesina & Arnaud Devleeschauwer & William Easterly & Sergio Kurlat & Romain Wacziarg, 2003.
"Fractionalization,"
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9411, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
[Downloadable!] (restricted)
Francisco Alcalá & Antonio Ciccone, 2001.
"Trade and Productivity,"
Economics Working Papers
580, Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, revised Jul 2002.
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