Vollrath, D. (2014) “Does Culture Matter for Economic Growth?“, The Growth Economics Blog, 18 June.
There’s been an increasing number of papers concerned with culture and its relationship to economic growth. I happened to just see this working paper by Di Tella and MacCulloch (2014), but the idea of culture being an important determinant of economic development levels has been hanging out there in the literature for a long time. Weber’s theory of the Protestant work ethic is probably the starting point for any discussion of this topic. More recent work tends to try and be more empirical than Weber, often using World Values Surveys as a means of measuring cultural elements. This is what Di Tella and MacCulloch do in their working paper. [If you’d like a good introduction to the culture literature, check out James Fenske’s course materials, in particular his “Foundations of Development” course].
I think this is pretty interesting reading, but I’m starting to get a little antsy about the use of the cross-country empirical work. Not in a standard “Identification!!” way, although that’s an issue, but in a slightly deeper way. In particular, why bother regressing GDP per capita (or growth, or any measure of economic activity) on cultural variables at all?
Relevant posts:
- Becker, W., Löchel, H. & Gregosz, D. (2013) “Crisis Management in the Euro Area: Why Europe’s Policy is on the Right Track“, The Konrad Adenauer Stiftung.
- Lof, Μ. & Malinen, Τ. (2014) “Determinants of the growth and sovereign debt correlation“, VoxEU Organisation, 25 May.
- Ahir, H. & Loungani, P. (2014) “‘There will be growth in the spring:’ How well do economists predict turning points?“, VoxEU Organisation, 14 April.