Bulletin n. 1/2017
June 2017
INDICE
  • Section A) The theory and practise of the federal states and multi-level systems of government
  • Section B) Global governance and international organizations
  • Section C) Regional integration processes
  • Section D) Federalism as a political idea
  • Christopher J. Ellis
    Dynamic dissolutions and unifications
    in Journal of Public Economic Theory , Volume 19, Issue 3 ,  2017 ,  692-712
    I reexamine the key results from the literature on the size and number of countries under different political institutions in a simple dynamic model. I find that the canonical static results that democracies lead to too many too-small countries and that Leviathans lead to too few too-large countries no longer necessarily hold. The key dynamic element that drives the new results is that public goods are modeled as public capital; this changes the incentives to unify or divide countries. I also show that there are hysteresis effects on the size and number of countries; that is, arbitrary initial configurations of national boundaries may tend to persist because of the initial public capital location decisions they promote.
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