The Topography of Nations

The Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs’ Trade, Development and Political Economy Series presents Treb Allen. How does the interplay of geographic, political and economic forces together affect the shape of nations? This paper presents a quantitative framework for answering these questions by deriving and characterizing the equilibrium evolution of national boundaries in a world with a rich geography. The framework is based on simple conditions that are the equilibrium outcomes from multiple disparate political economic micro-foundations. I characterize the existence, uniqueness, and efficiency of the dynamic equilibrium, and I provide a simple algorithm for its calculation. The framework does a good job of matching the empirical distribution of nations in Europe c.1000AD. Finally, I illustrate the power of the framework by providing several stylized examples of how it can be applied to understand how changes in the spatial distribution of resources, the cost of transit, and the productivity of different governments each affects the equilibrium shape of nations.