EAGER: Collaboratove Research: Diversity and the Wealth of Nations

EAGER：合作研究：多样性与国家财富

• 批准号: 1338738
• 负责人: Quamrul Ashraf
• 金额: $ 4.99万
• 依托单位: Williams College
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2013
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2013-09-01 至 2015-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1338738&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: EAGER; Collaboratove; Research; Diversity; Wealth

Diversity and the Wealth of Nations 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 differential timing of transitions from stagnation to growth and the remarkable transformation of the world income distribution in the last two centuries. While theoretical and empirical research has typically focused on the contemporaneous effects of such factors, 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. This research will advance and empirically examine several hypotheses about the importance of diversity in the understanding of contemporary economic development across the globe. The hypotheses rest on the interplay between two conflicting effects of diversity on the development process. On the one hand, diversity tends to reduce cooperation and disrupts socioeconomic order, inhibiting the ability of society to operate efficiently with respect to its production possibility frontier. On the other hand, a wider spectrum of traits is more likely to contain the ones that are more complementary to the development and successful implementation of advanced technological paradigms via (i) specialization in complementary tasks, or (ii) greater variance in cognitive traits conducive to innovations. This first part of the project will explore the role of diversity in the emergence and prevalence of interethnic conflicts in the modern era, reflecting the long shadow of prehistory through its effect on genetic diversity. Exploiting variations across national populations, it will establish that genetic diversity has contributed significantly to the incidence and onset of interethnic conflicts in the 20th century. In particular, this finding will be shown to reflect the adverse effect of diversity on interpersonal trust and cooperation, the contribution of diversity to inequality, the association between diversity and divergence in preferences for public goods and redistributive policies, and the impact of genetic diversity on the degree of ethnic fractionalization and polarization. The second part of the project will explore the role of European colonialism on comparative development across countries in the Americas over the last 500 years via its differential effect of the diversity of the American population. Specifically, the research will advance the hypothesis that the migration to the New World in the course of European colonization significantly altered the diversity and, hence, the composition of human capital in New-World countries. In particular, the level of diversity that existed in the New World during the pre-colonial era increased substantially, towards the optimal level, in the post-1500 time period. Moreover, consistently with documented patterns of European colonization, the increase in diversity was larger in those New World locations where the initial population density was lower. The proposed project will redirect research in the field of economic growth into important unexplored interdisciplinary avenues. Moreover, the research will yield important and novel policy implications by contributing to the understanding the of role of diversity in sustaining the growth process of advanced economies and in facilitating the economic take-off of less developed economies.

多样性与国富论 现有的比较发展理论突出了造成地球仪各地生活水平巨大不平等的各种直接和根本因素。地理、文化和制度因素、人力资本形成、种族、语言和宗教分化、殖民主义和全球化的重要性，一直是关于从停滞到增长的过渡时间差异的根源以及过去两个世纪世界收入分配的显著变化的辩论的中心。虽然理论和实证研究通常侧重于这些因素的同期影响，但最近注意力已转向“根深蒂固”的因素，这些因素被认为影响了从人类文明之初到现代的相对经济发展进程。 本研究将推进和实证检验几个假设的多样性在理解当代经济发展的重要性在地球仪。 这些假设的依据是多样性对发展进程的两种相互冲突的影响之间的相互作用。一方面，多样性往往会减少合作，扰乱社会经济秩序，抑制社会在生产可能性边界方面有效运作的能力。另一方面，更广泛的特征更有可能包含那些对先进技术范式的发展和成功实施更具互补性的特征，这些特征通过（i）互补任务的专业化，或（ii）有利于创新的认知特征的更大差异。 该项目的第一部分将探讨多样性在现代种族间冲突的出现和流行中的作用，通过其对遗传多样性的影响反映史前的长期阴影。利用各国人口的差异，它将确定遗传多样性对20世纪世纪种族间冲突的发生和爆发起着重要作用。特别是，这一发现将反映多样性对人际信任和合作的不利影响、多样性对不平等的贡献、多样性与公共产品偏好和再分配政策差异之间的关联，以及遗传多样性对种族分化和两极分化程度的影响。 该项目的第二部分将探讨欧洲殖民主义在过去500年中通过其对美国人口多样性的差异影响对美洲国家比较发展的作用。具体而言，研究将推进的假设，欧洲殖民化的过程中迁移到新世界显着改变了多样性，因此，在新世界国家的人力资本的构成。特别是，新世界在前殖民时代存在的多样性水平在1500年后时期大幅提高，达到最佳水平。此外，与记录的欧洲殖民模式一致，在最初人口密度较低的新大陆地区，多样性的增加幅度更大。 拟议的项目将把经济增长领域的研究转向重要的、尚未探索的跨学科途径。此外，这项研究将产生重要和新颖的政策影响，有助于理解多样性在维持发达经济体增长进程和促进欠发达经济体经济起飞方面的作用。