Citation

Discussion Paper Details

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Title: Long-Term Barriers to Economic Development

Author(s): Enrico Spolaore and Romain Wacziarg

Publication Date: September 2013

Keyword(s): diffusion of innovations, genetic distance, intergenerational transmission and Long-run growth

Programme Area(s): Development Economics, Economic History, International Macroeconomics and International Trade and Regional Economics

Abstract: What obstacles prevent the most productive technologies from spreading to less developed economies from the world?'s technological frontier? In this paper, we seek to shed light on this question by quantifying the geographic and human barriers to the transmission of technologies. We argue that the intergenerational transmission of human traits, particularly culturally transmitted traits, has led to divergence between populations over the course of history. In turn, this divergence has introduced barriers to the diffusion of technologies across societies. We provide measures of historical and genealogical distances between populations, and document how such distances, relative to the world'?s technological frontier, act as barriers to the diffusion of development and of specific innovations. We provide an interpretation of these results in the context of an emerging literature seeking to understand variation in economic development as the result of factors rooted deep in history.

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Bibliographic Reference

Spolaore, E and Wacziarg, R. 2013. 'Long-Term Barriers to Economic Development'. London, Centre for Economic Policy Research. https://cepr.org/active/publications/discussion_papers/dp.php?dpno=9638