Economic Integration and Political Disintegration

Romain Wacziarg, Enrico Spolaore and Alberto Alesina

Scholarly Articles from Harvard University Department of Economics

Abstract: In a world of trade restrictions, large countries enjoy economic benefits, because political boundaries determine the size of the market. Under free trade and global markets even relatively small cultural, linguistic or ethnic groups can benefit from forming small, homogeneous political jurisdictions. This paper provides a formal model of the relationship between openness and the equilibrium number and size of countries, and successfully tests two implications of the model. Firstly, the economic benefits of country size are mediated by the degree of openness to trade. Secondly, the history of nation-state creations and secessions is influenced by the trade regime.

Date: 2000
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (346)

Published in American Economic Review

Downloads: (external link)
http://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/4553029/alesina_integration.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Economic Integration and Political Disintegration (2000)
Working Paper: Economic Integration and Political Disintegration (1997)
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:hrv:faseco:4553029

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Scholarly Articles from Harvard University Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Office for Scholarly Communication ().