IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/kap/pubcho/v118y2004i1_2p183-209.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

A Social Contract Approach to the Formation of National Borders

Author

Listed:
  • Henry Tam

Abstract

This paper explores an economic model that elucidates the formation of national borders and explains the cross-sectional variance in the size of nations around the world. According to the present social contract approach, risk averse agents try to get out of the ``state of nature'' and get together to form societies to reduce consumption uncertainty, but heterogeneity averse agents will not allow nations to become too large. The model relates the geometry of a nation with the geography of its border and predicts the empirical observation that countries with ``coastline'' borders are larger than ``landlocked'' countries.

Suggested Citation

  • Henry Tam, 2004. "A Social Contract Approach to the Formation of National Borders," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 118(1_2), pages 183-209, January.
  • Handle: RePEc:kap:pubcho:v:118:y:2004:i:1_2:p:183-209
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://journals.kluweronline.com/issn/0048-5829/contents
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:kap:pubcho:v:118:y:2004:i:1_2:p:183-209. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.