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Discussion Paper Details

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Title: Linguistic Distances and their Use in Economics

Author(s): Victor Ginsburgh and Shlomo Weber

Publication Date: May 2015

Keyword(s): development, economic outcomes, growth, linguistic disenfranchisement and linguistic distances

Programme Area(s): Public Economics

Abstract: The paper offers an overview of the various approaches to compute linguistic distances (the lexicostatistic method, Levenshtein distances, distances based on language trees, phonetic distances, the ASJP project and distances based on learning scores) as well as distances between groups. It also briefly describes how distances directly affect economic outcomes such as international trade, migrations, language acquisition and earnings, translations. Finally, one can construct indices that take account (or not) of distances and how these indices are used by economists to measure their impact outcomes such as redistribution, the provision of public goods, growth, or corruption.

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Bibliographic Reference

Ginsburgh, V and Weber, S. 2015. 'Linguistic Distances and their Use in Economics'. London, Centre for Economic Policy Research. https://cepr.org/active/publications/discussion_papers/dp.php?dpno=10640