The art of making everybody happy: How to prevent a secession

Abstract

In this paper we examine compensation schemes that prevent a threat of secession by any of a country's regions. We prove that, under quite general assumptions on the distribution of citizens' preferences, there exist transfer schemes that are secession-proof. Moreover, we show that these compensation schemes entail a degree of partial equalization among regions: the gap between advantaged regions and disadvantaged regions has to be reduced but it should never be completely eliminated. We demonstrate that in the case of a uniform distribution of the nation's citizens, the secession-proof conditions generate the 50 percent compensation rule for disadvantaged regions. © 2003 International Monetary Fund.