TY - JOUR
T1 - Linguistic distance and economic development
T2 - A cross-country analysis
AU - Nakagawa, Mariko
AU - Sugasawa, Shonosuke
N1 - Funding Information:
We thank two anonymous referees for their great comments and suggestions to improve this paper. We also thank Takatoshi Tabuchi, Ryo Ito, Marcus Berliant, Takaaki Takahashi, Dan Sasaki, Hikaru Ogawa, and Shota Fujishima for their valuable suggestions. We are grateful to the seminar participants at the Urban Economics Workshop at the University of Tokyo, the ARSC annual meeting at Ryukyu University, the Asian Seminar in Regional Science at Tohoku University, and the Policy Modeling Workshop at National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies for their valuable comments. All remaining errors are the authors’ responsibility. This study is supported by the Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research (research project number 13J10130) for the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Fellows, Research Activity Start-up (research project number 16H06703), and Grant-in-Aid for Young Scientists (research project number 18K12764).
Funding Information:
We thank two anonymous referees for their great comments and suggestions to improve this paper. We also thank Takatoshi Tabuchi, Ryo Ito, Marcus Berliant, Takaaki Takahashi, Dan Sasaki, Hikaru Ogawa, and Shota Fujishima for their valuable suggestions. We are grateful to the seminar participants at the Urban Economics Workshop at the University of Tokyo, the ARSC annual meeting at Ryukyu University, the Asian Seminar in Regional Science at Tohoku University, and the Policy Modeling Workshop at National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies for their valuable comments. All remaining errors are the authors’ responsibility. This study is supported by the Grants‐in‐Aid for Scientific Research (research project number 13J10130) for the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Fellows, Research Activity Start‐up (research project number 16H06703), and Grant‐in‐Aid for Young Scientists (research project number 18K12764).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 The Authors. Review of Development Economics published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
PY - 2022/5
Y1 - 2022/5
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - domestic linguistic distance
KW - economic development
KW - international linguistic distance
KW - mismatch in language use
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U2 - 10.1111/rode.12850
DO - 10.1111/rode.12850
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85122080883
SN - 1363-6669
VL - 26
SP - 793
EP - 834
JO - Review of Development Economics
JF - Review of Development Economics
IS - 2
ER -
