Deep cultural ancestry and human development indicators across nation states.

ABSTRACT: How historical connections, events and cultural proximity can influence human development is being increasingly recognized. One aspect of history that has only recently begun to be examined is deep cultural ancestry, i.e. the vertical relationships of descent between cultures, which can be represented by a phylogenetic tree of descent. Here, we test whether deep cultural ancestry predicts the United Nations Human Development Index (HDI) for 44 Eurasian countries, using language ancestry as a proxy for cultural relatedness and controlling for three additional factors-geographical proximity, religion and former communism. While cultural ancestry alone predicts HDI and its subcomponents (income, health and education indices), when geographical proximity is included only income and health indi

SUBMITTER: Sookias RB 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5936893 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature