The Fractured-Land Hypothesis /
Fernández-Villaverde, Jesús.
The Fractured-Land Hypothesis / Jesús Fernández-Villaverde, Mark Koyama, Youhong Lin, Tuan-Hwee Sng. - Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2020. - 1 online resource: illustrations (black and white); - NBER working paper series no. w27774 . - Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w27774. .
September 2020.
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.
System requirements: Adobe [Acrobat] Reader required for PDF files.
Mode of access: World Wide Web.
The Fractured-Land Hypothesis / Jesús Fernández-Villaverde, Mark Koyama, Youhong Lin, Tuan-Hwee Sng. - Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2020. - 1 online resource: illustrations (black and white); - NBER working paper series no. w27774 . - Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w27774. .
September 2020.
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.
System requirements: Adobe [Acrobat] Reader required for PDF files.
Mode of access: World Wide Web.