Nation-Building and Education

Alberto Alesina, Paola Giuliano and Bryony Reich

No 18839, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Nations stay together when citizens share enough values and preferences and can communicate with each other. Democracies and dictatorships have different incentives when it comes to choosing how much and by what means to homogenize the population, i.e. “to build a nation”. We study and compare nation-building policies under the transition from dictatorship to democracy in a model where the location and type of government and the borders of the country are endogenous. We find that the threat of democratization provides the strongest incentive to homogenize. We focus upon a specific nation-building policy: the provision of mass primary education. As a motivation, we offer historical discussions of several episodes in the nineteenth century and suggestive correlations for a large sample of countries over the 1925-2014 period.

JEL-codes: F3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-his and nep-mic
Note: POL
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

Published as Alberto Alesina & Paola Giuliano & Bryony Reich, 2021. "Nation-Building and Education," The Economic Journal, vol 131(638), pages 2273-2303.

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