Well-Being in the Small and in the Large

Is it better to live in a big country than a small one? In this paper, I examine whether economic and social conditions vary systematically with the population of a country. Economics provides a number of theoretical reasons why country size should matter, for instance, because of increasing returns to scale or because it is easier to provide public goods to a larger populace. However, there is little empirical evidence linking the scale of country size to any of a multitude of indicators of economic and social welfare.