Download This PaperArtificial States
40 Pages Posted: 14 Jul 2006 Last revised: 9 Sep 2022
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Artificial States
Date Written: June 2006
Abstract
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.
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William Easterly
New York University - Department of Economics ( email )
269 Mercer Street
New York, NY 10003
United States
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