The Geography of Linguistic Diversity and the Provision of Public Goods / Klaus Desmet, Joseph Gomes, Ignacio Ortuño-Ortín.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Desmet, Klaus.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Gomes, Joseph.

Ortuño-Ortín, Ignacio.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w24694.

NBER working paper series no. w24694

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2018.

Summary:

This paper analyzes the importance of local interaction between individuals of different linguistic groups for the provision of public goods at the national level. The micro-founded conceptual framework we develop predicts that a country's public goods (i) decrease in its overall linguistic fractionalization, and (ii) either increase or decrease in its local learning multiplier, a measure of how local interaction affects antagonism towards other groups in the society at large. After constructing a 5 km by 5 km dataset on language use for 223 countries, we empirically explore these theoretical predictions. While overall fractionalization worsens public goods outcomes, we find a positive causal effect of local learning. Conditional on a country's overall diversity, public goods outcomes are maximized when there are a few large-sized groups and the diversity of each location mirrors that of the country as a whole. Our large-scale study, spanning the entire globe, confirms experimental micro-evidence in favor of contact theory.

Notes:

Print version record

June 2018.