Culture, Diffusion, and Economic Development

Ani Harutyunyan and Ömer Özak

No 1606, Departmental Working Papers from Southern Methodist University, Department of Economics

Abstract: This research explores the effects of culture on technological diffusion and economic development. It shows that culture's direct effects on development and barrier effects to technological diffusion are, in general, observationally equivalent. In particular, using a large set of cultural measures, it establishes empirically that pairwise differences in contemporary development are associated with pairwise cultural differences relative to the technological frontier, only in cases where observational equivalence holds. Additionally, it establishes that differences in cultural traits that are correlated with genetic and linguistic distances are statistically and economically significantly correlated with differences in economic development. These results highlight the difficulty of disentangling the direct and barrier effects of culture, while lending credence to the idea that common ancestry generates persistence and plays a central role in economic development.

Keywords: Comparative economic development; economic growth; culture; barriers to technological diffusion; genetic distances; linguistic distances (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O10 O11 O20 O33 O40 O47 O57 Z10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-evo, nep-gro, nep-ino, nep-pr~, nep-soc and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Culture, Diffusion, and Economic Development (2016)
Working Paper: Culture, diffusion, and economic development (2016)
Working Paper: Culture, diffusion, and economic development (2016)
Working Paper: Culture, Diffusion, and Economic Development (2016)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:smu:ecowpa:1606

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