Del tamaño ideal de los estados

Uno de las bitácoras más interesantes (y pedantes, no lo niego) que hay flotando por la red es el de Gary Becker y Eric Posner. El primero es un premio Nóbel de economía, casi nada. Vamos, sabe de lo que habla.

El último post de estos dos señores es extrañamente adecuado para algunas de las cosas que estamos hablando ahora, nacionalismos, vascos y secesiones. Becker se pregunta algo que deben plantearse los independentistas, ¿cuál es el tamaño ideal para un estado?

In the Federalist papers, Alexander Hamilton argued for the proposed U.S. Constitution that gave the federal government great powers because he claimed large countries with strong central governments have freer internal markets, can better deal with foreign aggression, and can raise taxes more easily to pay for needed government services.Yet since 1946, the number of countries has grown from about 76 to almost 200. Some of that growth has been due to countries gaining independence from colonial powers, such as India or Zaire. Others resulted from a subdivision of countries into smaller units, such as the breakups of Czechoslovakia into the Czech Republic and Slovakia, or of Yugoslavia into several independent nations. Agitation to form independent nations continues in all regions of the world.

Has this splintering into smaller nations, often due to nationalistic aspirations, lowered their economic efficiency? My conclusion is that developments in the global economy during the past 50 years have greatly reduced the economic disadvantages of small nations enumerated for his time by Hamilton. In fact, being small now may even have efficiency advantages. This would help explain the splintering of nations along ethnic, religious, linguistic, and geographic lines.

Merece la pena leer su argumento completo, y la respuesta de Posner. A fin de cuentas, vascos y catalanes podrían tener razón, incluso. Echadle un ojo.