Geography, Diversity and the Origins of the Wealth of Nations

现有的比较发展理论强调了造成地球仪生活水平巨大不平等的各种近因和根本因素。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、全球化一直是一场辩论的中心，这场辩论涉及从停滞向增长过渡的不同时间的起源，以及经济增长的显著转变。在过去的两个世纪里，世界的收入分配。虽然理论和实证研究通常侧重于这些因素在引起和维持工业革命以来人均收入差距方面的同时影响，最近，人们注意到“根深蒂固”这些因素被认为影响了从人类文明的曙光到现代的比较经济发展的过程。拟议的研究将提出一个新的假设数万年前确定的“根深蒂固”的因素对经济发展进程产生了重大影响，从而影响到地球仪的当代生活水平。这项研究将从经验上证明，从东非智人地理起源的迁移距离显著影响了各个社会的发展模式。特别是，它将表明，在人类离开非洲的过程中，迁移距离的变化在不同社会之间产生了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，遗传多样性将对发展成果产生非单调的影响，反映出社会内部与多样性有关的经济权衡。虽然中等水平的遗传多样性将被证明有利于经济发展，但高或低程度的多样性在增长过程中都是有害的力量，这种跨学科研究可能会促进经济学、进化生物学、人类学和地理学领域研究人员之间的互动，并将这些学科的研究转向重要的未开发领域。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起飞方面的作用。

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.