EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

The Breakup of Nations: A Political Economy Analysis

Patrick Bolton and Gérard Roland

The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 1997, vol. 112, issue 4, 1057-1090

Abstract: This paper develops a model of the breakup or unification of nations. In each nation the decision to separate is taken by majority voting. A basic trade-off between the efficiency gains of unification and the costs in terms of loss of control on political decisions is highlighted. The model emphasizes political conflicts over redistribution policies. The main results of the paper are i) when income distributions vary across regions and the efficiency gains from unification are small, separation occurs in equilibrium; and ii) when all factors of production are perfectly mobile, all incentives for separation disappear.

Date: 1997
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (359)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1162/003355300555420 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: The Break up of Nations: A Political Economy Analysis (1995) Downloads
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:qjecon:v:112:y:1997:i:4:p:1057-1090.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The Quarterly Journal of Economics is currently edited by Robert J. Barro, Lawrence F. Katz, Nathan Nunn, Andrei Shleifer and Stefanie Stantcheva

More articles in The Quarterly Journal of Economics from President and Fellows of Harvard College
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:oup:qjecon:v:112:y:1997:i:4:p:1057-1090.