Is it better to live in a big county than a small country? In this paper I examine whether economic and social conditions vary systematically with the population of a country. Economics provides a number of theoretical reasons why country size should matter, for instance because of increasing returns to scale or because it is easier to provide public goods to a larger populace. However there is little empirical evidence that links the scale of a country size to any of a multitude of indicators of economic and social welfare.
Keywords: population, empirical, data, national, country, scale, size.
Views expressed in the paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the Bank of Japan or Institute for Monetary and Economic Studies.