The Nigerian civil war of 1967-70 was precipitated by secession of the Igbo-dominated south-eastern region to create the state of Biafra. It was the first civil war in Africa, the predecessor of many. We investigate the legacies of this war four decades later. Using variation across ethnicity...

The paper ascribes to the literature analysing the conditions leading to the break-up of nations. The model englobes the existing literature and considers two separate spaces, a state and its region, where informed and non-informed citizens cohabit. We depart in considering that noninformed...

The gravity model of trade is utilized to assess the impact of disintegration on trade. The analysis is based on three recent disintegration episodes involving the former Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. The results point to a very strong home bias around the time of disintegration,...

We examine the incentives of regions in a country to unite or toseparate. We find that smaller regions have greater incentives tounite, relative to larger regions. We show, however, that on thewhole, majority voting on separation and union generates excessiveincentives to separate. This leads us...

In this report, we examine the long-run fiscal pressures that an independent Scotland may face, how these would differ from those facing the UK, and the size of the fiscal consolidation that may be required to put Scotland's public finances on a sustainable path. We do this using a model of the...