Multiple steady statehood: the roles of productive and extractive capacities
构建了一个国家模型，其中精英从臣民中提取资源，并投资于生产能力和提取能力，这两种投资共同作用可导致多重稳态均衡，解释不同国家在提取率、人口密度和产出上的差异。
Abstract This paper proposes a model of statehood, defined as elite extraction of resources from a subject population. Different from most of the existing literature, the size of the subject population evolves endogenously in a Malthusian fashion, and the elite take into account the effects on future population levels when taxing the current population. The elite can spend extracted resources by investing in productive and extractive capacities. Productive capacity increases the size of the pie, while extractive capacity makes it easier for the elite to tax it. Together—but not each on its own—these two types of investment can give rise to multiple steady-state equilibria, such that one steady state has both a higher rate of extraction, and higher population density and output, than the other steady state. The model can also account for a positive empirical relationship between land productivity and state antiquity among countries with relatively late state development.