The Fractured-Land Hypothesis
Jesús Fernández-Villaverde, Mark Koyama, Youhong Lin, Tuan-Hwee Sng
Patterns of political unification and fragmentation 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 political fragmentation. 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 either topography or productive land alone is sufficient to account for China's recurring political unification and Europe's persistent political fragmentation. The existence of a core region of high land productivity in Northern China plays a central role in our simulations. We discuss how our results map into observed historical outcomes and assess how robust our findings are
Year of publication: |
September 2020
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Authors: | Fernández-Villaverde, Jesús |
Other Persons: | Koyama, Mark (contributor) ; Lin, Youhong (contributor) ; Sng, Tuan-Hwee (contributor) |
Institutions: | National Bureau of Economic Research (contributor) |
Publisher: |
2020: Cambridge, Mass : National Bureau of Economic Research |
Subject: | Europa | Europe | Vergleich | Comparison | Politische Integration | Political integration | Dezentralisierung | Decentralization | China |
Saved in:
freely available
Extent: | 1 Online-Ressource illustrations (black and white) |
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Series: | NBER working paper series ; no. w27774 |
Type of publication: | Book / Working Paper |
Language: | English |
Notes: | System requirements: Adobe [Acrobat] Reader required for PDF files Mode of access: World Wide Web Hardcopy version available to institutional subscribers |
Other identifiers: | 10.3386/w27774 [DOI] |
Source: | ECONIS - Online Catalogue of the ZBW |
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012481077
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