TY  - JOUR
AU  - Spolaore, Enrico
AU  - Wacziarg, Romain
TI  - Long-Term Barriers to the International Diffusion of Innovations
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 17271
PY  - 2011
Y2  - August 2011
DO  - 10.3386/w17271
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w17271
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w17271.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Enrico Spolaore
Department of Economics
Tufts University
Braker Hall
8 Upper Campus Road
Medford, MA 02155
Tel: 617/627-4068
Fax: 617/627-3917
E-Mail: enrico.spolaore@tufts.edu

Romain Wacziarg
Anderson School of Management at UCLA
C-510 Entrepreneurs Hall
110 Westwood Plaza
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1481
Tel: 310 825 4507
E-Mail: wacziarg@anderson.ucla.edu
M1  - published as Enrico Spolaore, Romain Wacziarg. "Long-Term Barriers to the International Diffusion of Innovations," in Jeffrey Frankel and Christopher Pissarides, organizers, "NBER International Seminar on Macroeconomics 2011" University of Chicago Press (2012)

M3  - presented at "ISOM", June 17-18, 2011
AB  - We document an empirical relationship between the cross-country adoption of technologies and the degree of long-term historical relatedness between human populations. Historical relatedness is measured using genetic distance, a measure of the time since two populations' last common ancestors. We find that the measure of human relatedness that is relevant to explain international technology diffusion is genetic distance relative to the world technological frontier ("relative frontier distance"). This evidence is consistent with long-term historical relatedness acting as a barrier to technology adoption: societies that are more distant from the technological frontier tend to face higher imitation costs. The results can help explain current differences in total factor productivity and income per capita across countries.
ER  -