Nation-Building and Education

Alberto Alesina, Paola Giuliano and Bryony Reich

The Economic Journal, 2021, vol. 131, issue 638, 2273-2303

Abstract: Democracies and dictatorships have different incentives when it comes to choosing how much and by what means to homogenise 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 type of government and borders of the country are endogenous. We find that the threat of democratisation provides the strongest incentive to homogenise. We focus upon a specific nation-building policy: mass primary education. We offer historical discussions of nation-building across time and space, and provide correlations for a large sample of countries over the 1925–2014 period.

Date: 2021
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (21)

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Working Paper: Nation-Building and Education (2013)
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