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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Keeping Dictators Honest: The Role Of Population, Quoc-Anh Do, Filipe R. Campante
Keeping Dictators Honest: The Role Of Population, Quoc-Anh Do, Filipe R. Campante
Research Collection School Of Economics
In order to explain the apparently paradoxical presence of acceptable governance in many non-democratic regimes, economists and political scientists have focused mostly on institutions acting as de facto checks and balances. In this paper, we propose that population plays a similar role in guaranteeing the quality of governance and redistribution. We argue and demonstrate with historical evidence that the concentration of population around the policy making center serves as an insurgency threat to a dictatorship, inducing it to yield to more redistribution and better governance. We bring this centered concept of population concentration to the data through the Centered Index …
A Centered Index Of Spatial Concentration: Axiomatic Approach With An Application To Population And Capital Cities, Filipe R. Campante, Quoc-Anh Do
A Centered Index Of Spatial Concentration: Axiomatic Approach With An Application To Population And Capital Cities, Filipe R. Campante, Quoc-Anh Do
Research Collection School Of Economics
We construct an axiomatic index of spatial concentration around a center or capital point of interest, a concept with wide applicability from urban economics, economic geography and trade, to political economy and industrial organization. We propose basic axioms (decomposability and monotonicity) and refinement axioms (order preservation, convexity, and local monotonicity) for how the index should respond to changes in the underlying distribution. We obtain a unique class of functions satisfying all these properties, defined over any n-dimensional Euclidian space: the sum of a decreasing, isoelastic function of individual distances to the capital point of interest, with specific boundaries for the …