Artificial states
By: Alberto Alesina, William Easterly, Janina Matuszeski.
Contributors: Easterly, William, 1957-; Matuszeski, Janina.; National Bureau of Economic Research.
Series: NBER working paper series -- working paper 12328; Working paper series (National Bureau of Economic Research : Online) -- working paper no. 12328.
Publisher: National Bureau of Economic Research
Published: 2006
Place of publication: Cambridge, MA
Language: eng
Format: Electronic resource
Description: "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"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site.
Notes: Title from PDF file as viewed on 6/29/2006.

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