Agricultural Legacy, Individualistic Culture, and Techology Adoption

James Ang

No 1506, Economic Growth Centre Working Paper Series from Nanyang Technological University, School of Social Sciences, Economic Growth Centre

Abstract: This paper presents evidence on the relationship between culture and technology adoption. It hy-pothesizes that societies with more individualistic cultures are more inclined to embrace new tech-nologies. Using data for 82 countries, the estimates show that the technology adoption index of Comin et al. (2010) strongly correlates with national scores on individualistic cultures. Consistent evidence of this is provided by analysis conducted at the individual level using data from the World Value Surveys. Based on the notion that farming rice makes the members of a society more interdependent, and hence less individualistic, historical information on the suitability of land for rice farming is used as an instrument to isolate the endogenous influence of culture. Under the identifying restriction assumption that such an agricultural legacy explains differences in technolog-ical development in the modern world through influencing the formation of individualistic cultures, the instrumental variables estimates consistently show that the variation in the exogenous component of individualistic cultures significantly explains differences in the levels of current technology adoption across the globe. Similar findings are obtained when the analysis is conducted using state-level data from the United States. On the whole, these results lend strong support to our hypothe-sis that countries with higher scores on individualism are more inclined to adopt new technologies, thereby providing a framework for understanding the underlying causes of the variation in the lev-els of technological development across countries.

Keywords: technology adoption; individualism; cross-country studies (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O30 O40 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 34 pages
Date: 2015-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-evo, nep-gro and nep-sea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www3.ntu.edu.sg/hss2/egc/wp/2015/2015-06.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nan:wpaper:1506

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economic Growth Centre Working Paper Series from Nanyang Technological University, School of Social Sciences, Economic Growth Centre Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Magdalene Lim ().