Borders are a man made institution, and as such their shape cannot be taken as part of the physical landscape. The size of countries is endogenous to politico economic forces. This paper discusses recent efforts by economists to study three related question: what determines the evolution of the size of countries? Does size matter for economic success? Given the trend toward decentralization and...

Borders are a man-made institution, and as such their shape cannot be taken as part of the physical landscape. The size of countries is endogenous to politico-economic forces. This paper discusses recent efforts by economists to study three related questions: What determines the evolution of the size of countries? Does size matter for economic success? Given the trend toward decentralization an...

The recovery of social institution such as education is one of the major tasks in societies that have suffered armed conflict. Peace building represents an extraordinary set of social and political experiments focusing on the creation of politico-legal structures and development projects. Very often peace process is focused on rebuilding basic education with little focus on higher education tha...

Berlin is pursuing ambitious plans for security and defence, with significant potential for the Bundeswehr and European partner militaries. In the long-term, the Bundeswehr could well become Europe’s indispensable army, with Germany as a “framework nation” contributing decisively to NATO’s readiness. This will require the future German government to accept an unaccustomed politico-military lead...

This paper investigates the dynamics of corruption at the top (i.e., by politicians). For this purpose a dynamic, politico-economic framework is developed and analyzed. A particular feature of this investigation is an analytical characterization of the dynamic properties of the system. This allows one to interpret these properties in terms of economic and institutional parameters. As an example...