Nation-Building and Education / Alberto Alesina, Paola Giuliano. Bryony Reich.

By:

Alesina, Alberto

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Material type: Text

TextSeries: Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) ; no. w18839.Publication details: Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2013.Description: 1 online resource: illustrations (black and white)Subject(s):

F3 - International Finance

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Abstract: Nations stay together when citizens share enough values and preferences and can communicate with each other. Democracies and dictatorships have different incentives when it comes to choosing how much and by what means to homogenize the population, i.e. "to build a nation". We study and compare nation-building policies under the transition from dictatorship to democracy in a model where the location and type of government and the borders of the country are endogenous. We find that the threat of democratization provides the strongest incentive to homogenize. We focus upon a specific nation-building policy: the provision of mass primary education. As a motivation, we offer historical discussions of several episodes in the nineteenth century and suggestive correlations for a large sample of countries over the 1925-2014 period.

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Holdings
Item type	Home library	Collection	Call number	Status	Date due	Barcode	Item holds
Working Paper	Biblioteca Digital	Colección NBER	nber w18839 (Browse shelf(Opens below))	Not For Loan

Total holds: 0

February 2013.

Nations stay together when citizens share enough values and preferences and can communicate with each other. Democracies and dictatorships have different incentives when it comes to choosing how much and by what means to homogenize the population, i.e. "to build a nation". We study and compare nation-building policies under the transition from dictatorship to democracy in a model where the location and type of government and the borders of the country are endogenous. We find that the threat of democratization provides the strongest incentive to homogenize. We focus upon a specific nation-building policy: the provision of mass primary education. As a motivation, we offer historical discussions of several episodes in the nineteenth century and suggestive correlations for a large sample of countries over the 1925-2014 period.