How close? An attempt at measuring the cultural distance between countries

Gustavo De Santis (), Mauro Maltagliati () and Silvana Salvini ()
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Gustavo De Santis: Institute of Statistics, University of Florence
Mauro Maltagliati: Institute of Statistics, University of Florence
Silvana Salvini: Institute of Statistics, University of Florence

No 62, Working Papers from Institute of Statistics and Demography, Warsaw School of Economics

Abstract: We present a (to the best of our knowledge) new method for evaluating the relative distance between any two countries, among several, on the basis of individual data. First, clusters of respondents are formed and the proportion of each country’s respondents who belong to the various clusters is calculated. Under the assumptions that 1) respondents in the same cluster are similar to one another (and different from those who belong to different clusters), and 2) that two countries are close to each other when their nationals distribute similarly between clusters, the distance between countries can be expressed in terms of distance between the observed distributions (the average of the squared differences between the ranks). The method is applied to the WVS (World Value Survey) dataset for the years 1994-2007, first separately, by “domain” (opinions and attitudes on, e.g., religion, politics, and family), and then on all of the (selected) variables together. On the basis of the data of the WVS, this procedure leads us to conclude that Italy and Poland, the two countries of interest in this study, are very close to each other in the European context.

Keywords: Cultural Distance; European countries; Cluster analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Y8 Z1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 63 pages
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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