TY  - BOOK
AU  - Fernández-Villaverde,Jesús
AU  - Koyama,Mark
AU  - Lin,Youhong
AU  - Sng,Tuan-Hwee
ED  - National Bureau of Economic Research.
TI  - The Fractured-Land Hypothesis
T2  - NBER working paper series
PY  - 2020///
CY  - Cambridge, Mass.
PB  - National Bureau of Economic Research
N1  - September 2020; Hardcopy version available to institutional subscribers
N2  - 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
UR  - https://www.nber.org/papers/w27774
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.3386/w27774
ER  -