Paper Title
BUYING, SELLING AND ANNEXING REGIONS AND STATES: HOW ABOUT GREENLAND, AND HOW ABOUT ITS PRICE?

Abstract
Greenland has very recently received high attention due to Donald Trump’s challenge to compel Denmark to sell it – what is it worth? And his idea of annexing Canada was countered not only by Justin Trudeau but also by Ontario’s prime minister Doug Ford with the idea that Canada could buy Alaska and Minnesota. What could be the price? The idea is not absolutely new. More than a decade ago when Greece was in great financial difficulties the idea was brought up to sell part of the country, predominantly islands to potential investors to alleviate the budgetary problems. And throughout history regions and part of countries were sold and bought between emperors, kings and other rulers. At what price? For economists and social scientists this is a challenging question. We are used to describe countries and regions by various indicators of economic and social wellbeing but how to give a one-dimensional figure? This paper will make an attempt to find a method for giving regions a one-dimensional economic value in terms of the price of an asset.It will apply a well-known economic method to find a price and to compare them as to their attractiveness for a fictitious bid of potential investors.Basically it will regard regions as an asset and apply the evaluation procedure of discounting to find a price of the asset. It will take Greenland as a very special case at the moment but then continue with the nine provinces of Austria as a case study for such an approach and to find an answer to the thought experiment as to their price in case one of them has to be sold. It will treat these regions as potential investments on a capital market and apply the economics of credit and discounting to each of them. The resulting prices will be presented and compared to each other. Finally the outcomes, their comparability and applicability will be discussed. Keywords - Regions And States As Assets, Comparative Value, Evaluation Methods, Discounting Approach