TY  - JOUR
AU  - Alesina, Alberto
AU  - Easterly, William
AU  - Matuszeski, Janina
TI  - Artificial States
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 12328
PY  - 2006
Y2  - June 2006
DO  - 10.3386/w12328
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w12328
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w12328.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Alberto F. Alesina
E-Mail: *NA user is deceased

William Easterly
New York University
Department of Economics
19 W. 4th Street, 6th floor
New York NY 10012
Tel: 212/992-8684
Fax: 212/995-4186
E-Mail: william.easterly@nyu.edu

Janina Matuszeski
Oxfam America
226 Causeway St, Fifth floor
Boston MA 02141
Tel: 617-312-3562
E-Mail: jmatuszeski@gmail.com
AB  - 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.
ER  -