Artificial States

William Easterly, Alberto Alesina and Janina Matuszeski

No 100, Working Papers from Center for Global Development

Abstract: 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 how artificial states are. One is based on measuring how borders split ethnic groups into two separate adjacent countries. The other one 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.

Keywords: Artificial states; political borders (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F50 O10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 40 pages
Date: 2006-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-afr, nep-cdm, nep-dev and nep-pol
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

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Related works:
Journal Article: ARTIFICIAL STATES (2011)
Working Paper: Artificial States (2006)
Working Paper: Artificial States (2006)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cgd:wpaper:100

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