Consequences of Linguistic Distance for Economic Growth

This paper advances a new country-level measure of ethno-linguistic diversity, making use of Greenberg's definition of diversity by synthesizing information on the share of different ethno-linguistic groups in a country's population and, more importantly, information on intergroup linguistic distances derived from a recently developed lexicostatistical approach. I show that this measure captures ethno-linguistic diversity at lower levels of linguistic aggregation. However, unlike the commonly used phylogenetic language tree approach, I found that these distance-weighted diversity measures continue to have a strong negative statistical association with economic growth that is not sensitive to the underlying resemblance function between ethno-linguistic groups.