 Linguistic distance and economic development: A cross‐country analysisMariko Nakagawa and Shonosuke Sugasawa Review of Development Economics, 2022, vol. 26, issue 2, 793-834 Abstract: This study investigates the relationship between access to domestic and international communication and economic development. It does so by constructing two indices of linguistic distance, domestic and international, capturing language acquisition costs, which are higher when acquiring linguistically more distant languages. The domestic linguistic distance index captures the constraints of communication among speakers of different mother tongues within a country, while the international linguistic distance index captures the constraints of global communication via English. This study’s results reveal a negative association between domestic linguistic distance and GDP per capita, whereas international linguistic distance has no significant association. Moreover, by investigating the mechanisms of the negative association of the domestic linguistic distance, we find that communication difficulty among different language groups hinders economic development through a channel of less employment requiring communication‐based operations. Furthermore, we determine that the negative association of the domestic linguistic distance may be mainly driven by relatively poor countries such as many in Africa. Date: 2022 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:rdevec:v:26:y:2022:i:2:p:793-834 Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from Access Statistics for this article Review of Development Economics is currently edited by E. Kwan Choi More articles in Review of Development Economics from Wiley Blackwell |
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