More than half of the world's countries have fewer people than the state of Massachusetts. There was also an explosion in the number of new countries, many of them small.
Tiny nations are nothing new, of course.
Luxembourg has been around since 1839 and Monaco has been sovereign since 1419. They all came of age in the 1960s and 1970s, mostly as a result of decolonization. Not to mention a flock of new nations created in the 1990s by the bust-up of the Soviet Union. Stanford Business School's Romain Wacziarg , assistant professor of economics, explains that free trade makes small countries economically viable. And you can probably expect to see more new countries.