Linguistic distance and economic development: A cross‐country analysis

This study investigates the relationship between access to domestic and international communication economic development. It does so by constructing two indices of linguistic distance, international, capturing language acquisition costs, which are higher when acquiring linguistically more distant languages. The distance index captures constraints among speakers different mother tongues within a country, while global via English. study’s results reveal negative association GDP per capita, whereas has no significant association. Moreover, investigating mechanisms we find that difficulty groups hinders development through channel less employment requiring communication-based operations. Furthermore, determine may be mainly driven relatively poor countries such as many in Africa.