The Fractured-Land Hypothesis

Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde, Mark Koyama, Youhong Lin and Tuan-Hwee Sng

No 27774, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Patterns of state formation 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 polycentrism. 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 topography alone is sufficient, but not necessary, to explain polycentrism in Europe and unification in China. Differences in land productivity, in particular the existence of a core region of high land productivity in northern China, also deliver the same result. We discuss how our results map into observed historical outcomes, assess how robust our findings are, and analyze the predictions of our model for Africa and the Americas.

JEL-codes: H56 N40 P48 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-cmp, nep-cna, nep-dge, nep-his and nep-ure
Note: EFG
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Published as Jesús Fernández-Villaverde & Mark Koyama & Youhong Lin & Tuan-Hwee Sng, 2023. "The Fractured-Land Hypothesis," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol 138(2), pages 1173-1231.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w27774.pdf (application/pdf)

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:nbr:nberwo:27774

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w27774

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().