Why are small countries richer?

Whenever talk turns to Scottish independence, sooner or later someone will pop up and say, Scotland will be economically worse off as an independent country.

They then proceed to tick the boxes of a well-worn script featuring GERS, fiscal transfers, trade dependency, spending cuts and currency woes. Most of the assertions stem from using, what is at best incomplete information, to predict something that is very hard to predict.

I think it is better to look at the real world.

When you do that you see that the richest, fairest and most pleasant counties to live in are all countries with fewer than 10 million people.

This short film by VisualPolitik details some stats that prove that small countries are better and it also looks at the reasons why. It shows that in the modern world, small countries can rapidly improve from positions much worse than the one that the naysayers predict Scotland is in.

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