The 'Out of Africa' Hypothesis, Human Genetic Diversity, and Comparative Economic Development

By Quamrul H. Ashraf, Oded Galor. The American Economic Review, 2013

997 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This research argues that deep-rooted factors, determined tens of thousands of years ago, had a significant effect on the course of economic development from the dawn of human civilization to the contemporary era. It advances and empirically establishes the hypothesis that, in the course of the exodus of Homo sapiens out of Africa, variation in migratory distance from the cradle of humankind to various settlements across the globe affected genetic diversity and has had a long-lasting effect on the pattern of comparative economic development that is not captured by geographical, institutional, and cultural factors. In particular, the level of genetic diversity within a society is found to have a hump-shaped effect on development outcomes in both the pre-colonial and the modern era, reflecting the trade-off between the beneficial and the detrimental effects of diversity on productivity. While the intermediate level of genetic diversity prevalent among Asian and European populations has been conducive for development, the high degree of diversity among African populations and the low degree of diversity among Native American populations have been a detrimental force in the development of these regions.

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Citations in the corpus

Lights, Camera … Income! Illuminating the National Accounts-Household Surveys Debate (2016, background): “The core of our analysis in Section 5 will be running regressions similar to equation (12) presenting estimates of the optimal weight on GDP per capita b G bG+bS and the optimal weight on the survey means b bG+bS when the elementary specifications in equations (1), (2) and (3) — and hence, regressio”
State history and economic development: evidence from six millennia (2017, unknown): “…in Tables D9 and D10 in the Appendix, where we include linear and squared variables such as the time since transition to agriculture, state age, absolute latitude, migratory distance from Addis Ababa, and predicted genetic diversity (where the latter two are taken from Ashraf and Galor 2013).”
Is Poverty in the African DNA (Gene) (2017, methodology): “A recent study in this strand which has been qualified as the most important by Santos and Ferreira-Lopes (2013) is that of Ashraf and Galor (2011, 2013).”
Boys lag behind: How teachers’ gender biases affect student achievement (2020, unknown): “I correct for the sampling error that affects the standard errors of the coefficient β by using the same method as in Ashraf and Galor (2013). Appendix D contains a detailed presentation of the method.”
Ancestry, Language and Culture (2015, unknown): “Interesting discussions of the economic e¤ects of genetic diversity within populations and of the relationship between genetic and cultural diversity and fragmentation are provided in Ashraf and Galor (2013a, 2013b). p a = 0 and p b = 1), F ST takes value 1.”
Culture, Institutions, and the Wealth of Nations (2017, unknown): “…in the estimates of the coefficients on individualism when we augment this specification with nonlinear terms in ethnic fractionalization (not reported); therefore, our results for individualism are different from and not confounded by the diversity effects emphasized by Ashraf and Galor (2013).”
Ethnic Diversity and Poverty (2017, background): “…in understanding the role of broader socio-cultural factors such as colonial history, disease, geographic locale, and institutional factors in contributing to income distribution and poverty (see e.g., Acemoglu & Johnson, 2005; Acemoglu, Johnson, & Robinson, 2001, 2002; Ashraf & Galor, 2013).”
Skill Transferability, Migration, and Development: Evidence from Population Resettlement in Indonesia (2016, background): “1 cal settlement patterns like these can have persistent impacts on today’s economic landscape (Ashraf and Galor, 2013; Nunn and Qian, 2011; Putterman and Weil, 2010).”