Publication

This paper addresses artificial states, which are characterized by political borders that do not coincide with a division of nationalities desired by the people on the ground. The authors propose and compute for all countries in the world two new measures of how artificial states are. One is based on measuring how borders split ethnic groups into two separate adjacent countries and the other measures how straight land borders are. The authors then show that these two measures seem to be highly correlated with several measures of political and economic success.