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Alberto Alesina and Enrico Spolaore ,MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 2003, 261pp.
Imagine that the typical 50-page limit was removed from a journal article, not once but twice, giving the authors room to roam. That is basically what one has with this very interesting book. If you have already read Alesina, Spaolare, and Wacziarg, 'Economic Integration and Political Disintegration,' American Economic Review , 2001, and Alesina and Wacziarg, 'Openness, Country Size and the Government, 'Journal of Political Economy, 1998, you won't find any big surprises in this book. The same basic model, economic agents distributed uniformly along the unit interval, is used to deliver useful results on the optimal size of jurisdictions - here thought of as states - when determined by majority rule, as well as when determined by rent-maximising autocrats (the leviathan model).
The basic insight is easily comprehended. Size is beneficial: a bigger state can deliver more public goods (especially security and defence) and has greater weight in international affairs, such as trade negotiations. The extreme case of a big state is a hegemon, a role currently held by the USA. One of the very interesting implications of the model, which the authors could have pushed much further, is the foreseeable...