Long-Term Barriers to Economic Development

No 19361, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

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.

JEL-codes: O1 O11 O33 O43 O57 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cwa, nep-dev, nep-his and nep-hpe
Note: EFG POL
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (21)

Published as Handbook of Economic Growth Volume 2, 2014, Pages 121–176 Handbook of Economic Growth Cover image Chapter 3 – Long-Term Barriers to Economic Development Enrico Spolaore*, , Romain Wacziarg†,

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Related works:
Chapter: Long-Term Barriers to Economic Development (2014)
Working Paper: Long-Term Barriers to Economic Development (2013)
Working Paper: Long-Term Barriers to Economic Development (2013)
Working Paper: Long-Term Barriers to Economic Development (2013)
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