Working Paper: NBER ID: w19361
Authors: Enrico Spolaore; Romain Wacziarg
Abstract: What obstacles prevent the most productive technologies from spreading to less developed economies from the world's technological frontier? In this paper, we seek to shed light on this question by quantifying the geographic and human barriers to the transmission of technologies. We argue that the intergenerational transmission of human traits, particularly culturally transmitted traits, has led to divergence between populations over the course of history. In turn, this divergence has introduced barriers to the diffusion of technologies across societies. We provide measures of historical and genealogical distances between populations, and document how such distances, relative to the world's technological frontier, act as barriers to the diffusion of development and of specific innovations. We provide an interpretation of these results in the context of an emerging literature seeking to understand variation in economic development as the result of factors rooted deep in history.
Keywords: economic development; technology diffusion; genealogical distance; cultural traits; historical factors
JEL Codes: O10; O11; O33; O43; O57
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| genealogical distance (J12) | differentiation in vertically transmitted traits (J62) |
| differentiation in vertically transmitted traits (J62) | barriers to technology diffusion (O33) |
| genealogical distance (J12) | barriers to technology diffusion (O33) |
| genealogical distance (J12) | technology adoption (O33) |
| genetic distance (C49) | barriers to technology diffusion (O33) |
| genealogical distance (J12) | income differences (D31) |