The Fractured-Land Hypothesis

Fernández-Villaverde, Jesús, Mark Koyama, Youhong Lin and Tuan-Hwee Sng
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde

No 15209, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: Patterns of political unification and fragmentation have crucial implications for comparative economic development. Diamond (1997) famously argued that ``fractured land'' was responsible for China's tendency toward political unification and Europe's protracted political fragmentation. We build a dynamic model with granular geographical information in terms of topographical features and the location of productive agricultural land to quantitatively gauge the effects of ``fractured land'' on state formation in Eurasia. We find that either topography or productive land alone is sufficient to account for China's recurring political unification and Europe's persistent political fragmentation. The existence of a core region of high land productivity in Northern China plays a central role in our simulations. We discuss how our results map into observed historical outcomes and assess how robust our findings are.

Keywords: China; Europe; Great divergence; State capacity; Political fragmentation; Political centralization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H56 N40 P48 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-cmp, nep-his and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP15209 (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org

Related works:
Journal Article: The Fractured-Land Hypothesis (2023)
Working Paper: The Fractured-Land Hypothesis (2020)
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:cpr:ceprdp:15209

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP15209

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers Centre for Economic Policy Research, 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().