Abstract from Artificial States

William Easterly and Alberto Alesina paper (2006)

Introduction
Artificial states are those for which political borders do not coincide with a division of nationalities desired by the people on the ground. Former colonizers or post-war agreements amongst victors regarding borders have often created monstrosities in which ethnic or religious or linguistic groups were thrown together or separated without any respect for peoples. aspirations. Eighty percent of African borders follow latitudinal and longitudinal lines and many scholars believe that such artificial (unnatural) borders, which create ethnically fragmented countries or, conversely, separate into bordering countries the same people, are at the roots of Africa's economic tragedy.

Not only in Africa but everywhere around the globe from Iraq to the Middle East failed states, conflict and economic misery often are very visible around borders left over by former colonizers, borders that had little resemblance to natural division of peoples.
There are three ways in which those who drew borders created problems.

First they gave territories to one group ignoring the fact that another group had already claimed the same territory.

Second, they drew boundaries lines splitting ethnic (or religious or linguistic) groups into different countries, frustrating national ambitions of various groups and creating unrest in the countries formed.

Third they combined into a single country groups that wanted independence.
The results can be disastrous. Arti.cial borders increase the motivation to safeguard or advance nationalist agendas at the expense of economic and political development.

As George Bernard Shaw eloquently put it "A healthy nation is as unconscious of its nationality as a healthy man is unconscious of his health. But if you break a nation's nationality it will think of nothing else but getting is set again."

While the nature of borders has been mentioned in the poltical science (especially) and economic literature, we are not aware of systematic work relating the nature of country borders to the economic success of countries. Our goal is to provide measures that proxy for the "naturalness" or "arti.ciality" of borders and relate them to economic and political development. We provide two measures never before used in econometric analysis of comparative development.

One measure is relatively simple and captures whether or not an ethnic group is "cut" by a political border. That is, we measure situations in which the same ethnic group is present in two bordering countries. This measure accounts fairly precisely for one of the ways in which borders may be "wrong", namely when borders cut through groups' land leave them in separate countries. But it does not capture other ways in which borders may be "artificial"; for instance situations in which two ethnic groups are forced into the same country. We then provide a second measure, based upon the assumption that if a land border is close to a straight line it is more likely to be drawn arti.cially; if it is relatively squiggly it is more likely to represent either geographic features (rivers, mountains etc.) and/or divisions carved out in time to separate different people.

Needless to say, the measure is not perfect, but much of our paper is about precisely discussing this measure and alternatives. It turns out that our two new measures are in fact not highly correlated, implying that they capture different aspects of the arti.cial nature of states.

After we have constructed our measures we explore how they are correlated with various standard measures of economic development such as per capita GDP, measures of institutional success such as freedom or corruption, and measures of quality of life and public services, such as infant mortality and education.

Both measures of artificiality are correlated with several variables that measure politico-economic development. Artifcial states measured by the two proxies described above, function much less well than non-artificial states. The correlation of our measures with measures of politico-economic success of various countries are fairly robust to controlling for climate, colonial past and the other traditional measures of ethnolinguistic fractionalization.
We also checked our measures.relationship to the occurrence of wars, domestic or international. Our results are just a .rst step towards further research. A measure of political instability and violence is indeed correlated with our measure of arti.cial states; however we do not .nd evidence of correlations between the number and intensity for wars fought by one country with our measures of artificial borders.

Future research needs to address these questions using data on bilateral conflicts around various types of borders. Because borders can be changed, as Alesina and Spolaore (1997) emphasized,
citizens can rearrange the borders of artificial states. Indeed this happens; once can consider the breakdown of the Soviet Union. In fact it is quite possible that as time goes by many currently straight borders will become squiggly as they are rearranged. Relatively newly independent countries have had "less time" than countries which have been never colonized to carve their borders as a result of an equilibrium reflecting how different people want to organize
themselves. With specific reference to Africa, Englebert, Trango and Carter (2002) document several instances of border instability in Africa due to the artificial original borders. Even amongst never-colonized countries, tensions remain, for example the Basque independentist movement in Spain.

We are not aware of other papers that have attempted to consider formally (as opposed to narratively) the relationship of the shape of countries to economic development, however our paper is related to three strands of the literature.

One strand is the recent work on the size of countries and its relationship with economic growth, as in Alesina and Spolaore (2003), Alesina Spolaore and Wacziarg (2000), and Alcala and Ciccone (2004), amongst others.

Second,our work builds on the literature concerning the relationship between ethno-linguistic fractionalization and economic growth, as in Easterly and Levine(1997) , Alesina et. al. (2003), and several others. Our paper discusses one historical phenomenon that may have led to excess ethnic fractionalization.

Third, the role of former colonizers has also been widely studied (see Acemoglu,Johnson and Robinson (2001) Glaeser et al(2004)) but not speci.cally with regards to the importance of borders. Our paper speci.es a new mechanism by which colonizers a¤ected subsequent development. In many ways we bridge these three strands because we focus on how colonizers have created fragmented societies by drawing artificial borders.


Conclusions
The idea of "failed states" is a recurrent theme both in newspapers and within academia. The borders of many countries have been the result of processes that have little to do with the desire of people to be together or not. In some cases groups who wanted to be separate have been thrown into the same political unit; others have been divided by artificial borders. Former colonizers have been mainly responsible for such mistakes, but the botched agreements after
the two major wars of the last century have also played a role.

The main contribution of this paper is to provide two new measures meant to capture how "artificial" political borders are. One measure considers how straight land borders are, under the assumption that straight borders are more like to be artificial and less likely to follow geographic features or the evolution of hundreds of years of border design.

The second measure focuses on ethnic or linguistic groups separated by borders. We have then investigated whether these variables are correlated with the politico-economic success of various countries, and we found that indeed they are.

The general patterns of correlations that we presented in a battery of tables suggest that these two new measures do quite well in cross-country regressions in which other exogenous measures of geography, ethnic fragmentation and colonial status are controlled for.

We have also explored the correlation of our measures of artificial borders with the occurrence of civil and international wars and our results are inconclusive. While we find correlations of our variables with measure of political instability and lack of democracy, we do not find a clear pattern of correlations with wars. Further research is needed on this point looking at bilateral data on wars, namely which country engaged in war with whom.

Probably the single most important issue that we have not addressed is that of migrations. One consequences of artificial borders is that people may want to move, if they can. Often movement of peoples is not permitted by various government but migration certainly occur. In some cases migrations that respond to artificial borders may be partly responsible for economic costs, wars,
dislocation of people, refugee crises and a hots of undesirable circumstances.

Thus, the need to migrate, created by the wrong borders may be one reason why artificial borders are inefficient. But sometimes the movement of people may correct for the artificial nature of borders. This dynamic aspects of movement of people and migrations, and changes of borders for that matter is not considered in this paper in which we consider a static picture of the world.

The bottom line in this paper is that the artificial borders bequeathed by
colonizers were a significant hindrance to the political and economic development of the independent states that followed the colonies.