A Framework for Analyzing Language and Welfare (original) (raw)
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Journal of Economic Literature, 2020
The paper brings together methodological, theoretical, and empirical analysis into the single framework of linguistic diversity. It reflects both historical and contemporary research by economists and other social scientists on the impact of language on economic outcomes and public policies. We examine whether and how language influences human thinking (including emotions) and behavior, analyze the effects of linguistic distances on trade, migrations, financial markets, language learning and its returns. The quantitative foundations of linguistic diversity, which rely on group identification, linguistic distances as well as fractionalization, polarization and disenfranchisement indices are discussed in terms of their empirical challenges and uses. We conclude with an analysis of linguistic policies and shifts of languages and examine their welfare effects and the trade-offs between the development of labor markets and the social costs that they generate in various countries.
The Economics of Language: An Introduction and Overview
SSRN Electronic Journal
The Economics of Language: An Introduction and Overview¹ This paper provides an introduction and overview of my research on the Economics of Language. The approach is that language skills among immigrants and native-born linguistic minorities are a form of human capital. There are costs and benefits associated with this characteristic embodied in the person. The analysis focuses on the economic and demographic determinants of destination language proficiency among immigrants. This is based on Exposure, Efficiency and Economic Incentives (the three E's) for proficiency. It also focuses on the labor market consequences (earnings) of proficiency for immigrants and native-born bilinguals. The empirical testing for the US, Canada, Australia, Israel and Bolivia is supportive of the theoretical models.
Economics and (Minority) Language: Why is it so Hard to Save a Threatened language?
Linguistic and cultural diversity is a fundamental aspect of the present world. It is therefore important to understand how this diversity could be sustained. Certainly, the education system, the justice system, and the economic decisions will play an important role. Our view is that a key agent in keeping diversity is the minority language speaker. Thus, we focus on the bilinguals' language choice behavior in societies with two official languages: A, spoken by all, and B, spoken by the bilingual minority. This kind of bilinguals is thought of as a population playing repeatedly a game that decides the language they will use in each interaction. We make the hypothesis that bilinguals have reached a population state with strong stability properties. Then we take the evolutionary stable mixed strategy Nash equilibrium of the game to build an economic model of linguistic behavior. It is shown that model-based predictions fit well the actual use data of Basque, Irish and Welsh. Some language policy prescriptions are provided to increase the use of B.
Economic Challenges of Multilingual Societies
We analyze challenges encountered by multilingual societies: linguistic standardization, linguistic disenfranchisement, and the optimal choice of linguistic regime. While the analysis is conceived generally to apply to any multilingual society, we pay particular attention to linguistic policies in the European Union. We analyze the optimal choice of linguistic regime, taking into account possible externalities between languages and dynamic effects of language proficiency. We also discuss the feasibility of linguistic reform in the EU.
The Journal of Development Studies, 2020
This paper investigates the economic returns to language skills and bilingualism in Kazakhstan, a multi-ethnic country that started switching its official state language from Russian to Kazakh in 1997. Using newly assembled data for four major cities in 1996 and 2010, we find heterogenous wage premia and penalties for speaking Kazakh across cities and over time. We relate the wage patterns to (i) changing demographic environments, (ii) changing gaps in school resources between schools with Russian vs. Kazakh language of instruction, and (iii) changing labour market segmentation. While wage differences narrowed in line with a balancing language policy in some cities, others experienced a rise in labour market segmentation. Regionally emerging wage penalties for Kazakh fluency might impede the formation of a bilingual society, as politically desired.
Language rights: A welfare-economics approach.
The Palgrave handbook of economics and language (Victor Ginsburgh and Shlomo Weber, eds.). Basingstoke: Palgrave-Mac Millan., 2016
Distributions of language rights in multilingual settings are analyzed from a normative viewpoint in this chapter. If the cost structure of providing rights is concave in the number of bene iciaries, then a critical-mass criterion for the determination of an optimal rights structure results. It is further shown that an ef iciency analysis based on a 'naive' cost-bene it calculation has to be augmented in various ways if rights inluence the status of a language, which in turn in luences the preferences for language rights. Also the inter-generational transfer of language repertoires to the next generation leads to an endogeneity of preferences. The endogeneity of preferences in turn can make the cost-bene it analysis contradictory. In a welfare-maximizing approach, redistribution goals further modify the analysis.
International migration and the economics of language
International Migration and the Economics of Language * This paper provides a review of the research on the 'economics of language' as applied to international migration. Its primary focuses are on: (1) the effect of the language skills of an individual on the choice of destination among international (and internal) migrants, both in terms of the ease of obtaining proficiency in the destination language and access to linguistic enclaves, (2) the determinants of destination language proficiency among international migrants, based on a model (the three E's) of Exposure to the destination language in the origin and destination, Efficiency in the acquisition of destination language skills, and Economic incentives for acquiring this proficiency, (3) the consequences for immigrants of acquiring destination language proficiency, with an emphasis on labor market outcomes, and in particular earnings. Factors that are considered include age, education, gender, family structure, costs of migration, linguistic distance, duration in the destination, return migration, and ethnic enclaves, among others. Analyses are reported for the immigrant experiences in the US, Canada, Australia, the UK, Germany, Israel and Spain.
Language Learning and Communicative Benefits
The Palgrave Handbook of Economics and Language, 2016
We examine how economic variables impact linguistic diversity and language acquisition. The economic variables in our setting are represented by communicative benefits introduced by Selten and Pool (1991), which subsumes both private monetary rewards and 'pure communicative' benefits of exposure and access to different cultures. The communicative benefits are positively correlated with the number of others with whom individuals can communicate by using one of her spoken languages. Economic examples of communicative benefits are evident in trade, labor market, and migration. We examine the empirical and theoretical literature on language acquisition Nash equilibria and offer an extensive efficiency analysis by using both positive and normative approaches. We also examine various public policies that could enhance the efficiency of selected outcomes.
Culture, Languages, and Economics
The impact of various facets of cultural diversity on economic outcomes has become a topic of intensive research in economics. This paper focuses on linguistic diversity as one of the important aspects of cultural heterogeneity, and more specifically, The aim of this paper is to formally examine two opposing forces, standardization and efficiency on the one hand, and cultural attachment and linguistic disenfranchisement, on the other, and to outline ways of bringing them to balance each other. In our measurement of disenfranchisement and fractionalization we heavily rely on the notion of linguistic distances or proximity between various linguistic groups. We also analyze the impact of linguistic diversity on trade, migration and markets for translation. We conclude by examining the issue of disenfranchisement in the European Union and possible standardization policies to address this issue.