Geography, Diversity and the Origins of the Wealth of Nations

现有的比较发展理论强调了全球生活水平巨大不平等背后的各种近因和终极因素。地理、文化和制度因素、人力资本形成、种族、语言和宗教分割、殖民主义和全球化的重要性一直是一场关于过去两个世纪从停滞向增长过渡的不同时机以及世界收入分配显著变化的辩论的中心。虽然理论和实证研究通常集中在工业革命以来导致和维持人均收入差距的这些因素的同时代影响，但最近人们关注的是从人类文明开始到现代，被认为影响比较经济发展进程的“根深蒂固”的因素。拟议的研究将提出一个新的假设，即“根深蒂固的”因素在数万年前决定的，对经济发展的进程，从而对全球当代生活水平产生重大影响。这项研究将经验性地证明，距离东非智人地理起源的迁徙距离显著影响了各社会的发展模式。特别是，它将表明，在人类离开非洲的过程中，迁徙距离的变化造成了不同社会的遗传多样性程度的异质性，这对各国的比较发展产生了长期影响。此外，遗传多样性将被证明对发展成果具有非单调影响，反映了一个社会内与多样性相关的经济权衡。虽然中等水平的遗传多样性将被证明有利于经济发展，但高度或低程度的多样性是增长过程中的不利力量。这种跨学科的研究可能会促进经济学、进化生物学、人类学和地理学领域的研究人员之间的互动，并将这些学科的研究重新引导到重要的未知领域。此外，它将产生重要的、新颖的政策影响，有助于理解广义的多样性在维持发达经济体的增长进程和促进欠发达经济体的经济腾飞方面的作用。

Existing theories of comparative development highlight a variety of proximate and ultimate factors underlying some of the vast inequities in living standards across the globe.The importance of geographical, cultural and institutional factors, human capital formation, ethnic, linguistic, and religious fractionalization, colonialism, and globalization has been at the center of a debate regarding the origins of the di¤erential timing of transitions from stagnation to growth and the remarkable transformation of the world income distribution in the past two centuries. While theoretical and empirical research has typically focused on the contemporaneous e¤ects of such factors in giving rise to and sustaining the divergence in income per capita since the Industrial Revolution, attention has recently been drawn towards "deep-rooted" factors that have been argued to affect the course of comparative economic development from the dawn of human civilization to the modern era.The proposed research will advance a novel hypothesis that "deep-rooted" factors, determined tens of thousands of years ago, had a significant effect on the course of economic development and thus on contemporary living standards across the globe. The research will empirically establish that migratory distance from the geographical origin of Homo sapiens in east Africa significantly affected the pattern of development across societies. In particular, it will demonstrates that in the course of the exodus of humans out of Africa, variation in migratory distance generated heterogeneity in the degree of genetic diversity across societies,which had a long-lasting effect on comparative development across countries. Moreover, genetic diversity will be shown to have a non-monotonic effect on development outcomes, reflecting the economic trade-off associated with diversity within a society. While an intermediate level of genetic diversity will be shown to be conducive for economic development, a high or a low degree of diversity is a detrimental force in the growth process.This interdisciplinary research is likely to foster interaction between researchers in the fields of economics, evolutionary biology, anthropology, and geography and to redirect research in these disciplines into important unexplored territories. Moreover, it will yield important, novel, policy implications by contributing to the understanding the role of diversity, broadly defined, in sustaining the growth process of advanced economies and in facilitating the economic take-off of less developed economies.