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Culture, Society & Family Economics & Statistics

Vast majority of European Union citizens are marginalized by dominance of English language

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date January 26, 2012
1 Comment on Vast majority of European Union citizens are marginalized by dominance of English language

The European Union has 27 member countries and 23 official languages, but its official business is carried out primarily in one language — English. Yet the striking findings of a new study show that barely a third of the EU’s 500 million citizens speak English.

What about the other two-thirds? They are linguistically disenfranchised, say the study’s authors.

For the EU’s non-English speakers, their native languages are of limited use in the EU’s political, legal, communal and business spheres, conclude economists Shlomo Weber, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, and Victor Ginsburgh, Free University of Brussels (ULB), the authors who conducted the study. Those who are disenfranchised have limited access to EU laws, rules, regulations and debates in the governing body — all of which may violate the basic principles of EU society, the researchers say.

“Language is the proxy for engagement. People identify strongly with their language, which is integral to culture and traditions,” Weber says. “Language is so explosive; language is so close to how you feel.”

Weber and Ginsburgh base their findings on a new methodology they developed to quantitatively evaluate both costs and benefits of government policies to either expand or reduce diversity. The method unifies previous approaches to measure language diversity’s impact, an area of growing interest to scholars of economics and other social sciences.

“With globalization, people feel like they’ve been left on the side of the road. If your culture, your rights, your past haven’t been respected, how can you feel like a full member of society?” says Weber. “It is a delicate balance. People must decide if they want to trade their languages to increase by a few percentage points the rate of economic growth.”

Methodology can be applied to language diversity in other nations, including the United States
Beyond the EU, the Weber-Ginsburgh methodology can evaluate linguistic policies in other nations, too, including the U.S. It builds on a body of earlier published research by Weber, Ginsburgh and other economists.

“Our analysis offers a formal framework by which to address the merits and costs of the vast number of languages spoken in various countries,” said Weber. “We formally measure linguistic similarities and subsequently the linguistic distances between groups who speak various languages.”

The methodology also can measure the impact of other kinds of diversity, whether animal and plant biodiversity or economic classes of people, say the study’s authors.

They report their findings and present the methodology in their new book, “How Many Languages Do We Need? The Economics of Linguistic Diversity” (Princeton University Press). The research is noted on the web site of the International Monetary Fund in a review by Henry Hitchings.

Quantitative analysis finds English is the language spoken by largest percentage of EU citizens
Previous researchers found that 90 percent of the EU’s official documents are drafted in English and later translated to other languages, often French and sometimes German. Previous research also has documented frustration among EU officials with the political entity’s multitude of languages, as members wonder whether they are being understood.

Against that backdrop, the Weber-Ginsburgh analysis of the EU used official data from a routinely conducted EU survey of member states carried out in 2005 and later. The data came from answers to questions that included: What is your mother tongue? Which languages are you conversant in? How do you rate your fluency on a scale of very good, good or basic?

Weber and Ginsburgh found that of all the languages, English embraces the most EU citizens, followed by German second and French third.

English, German and French fall short
Yet those languages fall far short of including all people. The economists found that many EU residents are excluded.

Nearly two-thirds of EU citizens — 63 percent — don’t speak or understand English, while 75 percent don’t readily speak or understand German, and 80 percent don’t speak or understand French.

“English is spoken almost everywhere around the world,” the authors write, “but it is still far from being spoken by almost everyone.” At the same time, many non-native speakers of English feel the onslaught of that language’s global domination, a phenomenon that wasn’t generally foreseen and that evolved only within the last 60 years.

Weber and Ginsburgh discovered one EU age group that is less marginalized by English than other groups — youth ages 15 to 29. Fewer than half the young people — 43 percent — are disenfranchised, the researchers found.

The economists also introduce the concept of “proximity” — the degree to which languages are similar to one another. People who speak similar languages are less disenfranchised from one another, they say. Similarity is a factor of pronunciation, phonetics, syntax, grammar and vocabulary, although the authors caution that even words that seem alike aren’t always related, but instead are merely similar by chance or because languages borrow words.

Language represents identity and culture
Among the world’s 271 nations, more than 6,900 languages are spoken, Weber and Ginsburgh say.

Their research has found that there is no optimal degree of language diversity for a society, but many examples throughout history demonstrate that too much linguistic diversity is expensive, detrimental and often divisive, they say.

“The story of post-colonial Africa — what’s been called Africa’s growth tragedy — offers a painful example of the heavy costs incurred by a multitude of linguistic and ethnic divisions,” Weber says.

Language and cultural differences frequently have played a role in war, underdevelopment, brutal changes of power, poor administration, corruption and slacking economic growth, say the authors. Linguistic divides also impose friction on trade between countries, as well as influence migratory flows, literary translations or votes cast in various contests.

For example, in Sri Lanka two linguistic groups fought a bloody civil war for 25 years, killing tens of thousands of people, note Weber and Ginsburgh.

More recently, the former Belgian Prime Minister became infuriated at a position taken by U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron and decided to vent his ire by hurling the supreme insult: Refusing to speak English when addressing the official EU body, and opting instead for his native Flemish.

Designating an official language must weigh costs, benefits
Can the EU ever mandate an official language that embraces its 500 million citizens? How can Nigeria manage 527 languages spoken by citizens of that country? Or Cameroon, with its 279? How does democracy function in India, where 30 languages thrive among more than 1 billion native speakers?

About one-third of the world’s nations have met these challenges by legislating official language provisions in their constitutions, the authors say. The official language typically applies to official documents, communication between institutions and citizens and debates in official bodies.

But to scientifically determine an optimal set of core languages, the authors say, nations must weigh the costs of linguistic disenfranchisement against the benefits of standardization.

“History provides many examples of political regimes that have mandated single languages for efficiency or social control reasons, many of which have proved unsustainable in the face of backlash from those disenfranchised linguistically,” Weber says. “At the other end of the spectrum, other countries have permitted, by default or design, linguistic anarchy in which dozens or even hundreds of languages exist — to the detriment of even basic efficiency. ‘How Many Languages Do We Need?’ provides a common-sense argument and quantitative methodology to evaluate both criteria for languages: efficiency and enfranchisement, which are indispensable for sustainable globalization in our fractionalized world.” 

France: An example of linguistic diversity handled well
Over the course of human history, has any country handled their linguistic diversity well?

“France,” Weber says. “Two hundred years ago, France had a lot of dialects, and only 3 million of its 28 million people spoke French. That’s only 10 percent of the people. In a bloodless transition the government imposed French as the official language but allowed dialects to flourish.”

Weber is the Robert H. and Nancy Dedman Trustee Professor of Economics at SMU. He is also a PINE Foundation professor of economics at the New Economic School, Moscow.

Ginsburgh is professor of economics emeritus at ULB, member of the European Center for Advanced Research in Economics and Statistics in Brussels, and a member of the Center of Operations research and Econometrics, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium. — Margaret Allen

SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.

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International Monetary Fund: A review of “How Many Languages Do We Need?”

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date January 26, 2012

Renowned non-fiction author Henry Hitchings covers SMU economist Shlomo Weber‘s new book “How Many Languages Do We Need? The Economics of Linguistic Diversity” (Princeton University Press).

Writing for the International Monetary Fund, Hitchings’ review “Speaking in Tongues” notes that Weber and his co-author, Victor Ginsburgh, have scrupulously researched the costs and benefits of the many languages across the globe. Hitchings, the author of “The Language Wars” and “The Secret Life of Words” among other books, notes that the books most thought-provoking section is the case study of linguistic policy in the European Union.

Hitchings, whose focus is language and cultural history, summarizes the message of the book: “Reform of the European Union’s linguistic workings calls for collaboration, which touches on a fundamental issue of the book: the vexed question of what the ‘we’ in the book’s title really means. It is a pronoun that implies togetherness. It is an appeal for community. But it evokes widely differing solidarities, bonds, and priorities. In any debate about language (or politics), ‘we’ is hard to come by, as this book makes very clear.”

Weber is the Robert H. and Nancy Dedman Trustee Professor of Economics at SMU and director of the Richard Johnson Center for Economic Studies at SMU. He is also a PINE Foundation professor of economics at the New Economic School, Moscow.

Weber’s main area of research is game theory and its applications to public finance, political economy and international trade. Weber has consulted on numerous projects for private businesses, international organizations and governments in Asia, North America, Western and Eastern Europe.

Read the full review (Scroll down).

EXCERPT:

Speaking in Tongues
By Henry Hitchings
In this scrupulously researched study, Belgian economist Victor Ginsburgh, whose native language is Swahili, and game theorist Shlomo Weber, a Canadian citizen who is a native Russian speaker, assess the costs and benefits of the vast number of languages currently in use across the globe.

It is commonly assumed that a reduction in the number of languages improves efficiency. Although no one knows the exact number of living languages, the figure is astonishingly large—a sensible estimate would be 6,000–7,000. But half the world’s population has one out of a mere eleven of these as a first language.

Most developed economies are in countries where a single language predominates; in countries where there is great linguistic diversity there tends also to be much bureaucracy and wastefulness. The nonprofit SIL International, which maintains a database of the world’s languages, reports that 278 are currently used in Cameroon; the figures for Chad, Nigeria, and Papua New Guinea are, respectively, 131, 514, and 830. It is easy to see how this kind of linguistic multiplicity might impede economic development—for instance, by hampering geographical and social mobility and by obstructing many citizens’ access to key legal services.

Utopian thinkers have long imagined that technology and political planning will one day end civilization’s linguistic tension and confusion. Today there is support for the idea of establishing English as the global lingua franca. Indeed, many believe it already is. Yet the dominance of one language leads to the erosion of others—potentially a catastrophe for the world’s linguistic and cultural ecosystem. Ginsburgh and Weber quote the playwright Ariel Dorfman, born in Chile but now a U.S. citizen: “The ascendancy of English, like so many phenomena associated with globalization, leaves too many invisible losers, too many people silenced.”

Ginsburgh and Weber often write in a highly technical fashion, scrutinizing such matters as cladistic distance, ethnolinguistic fractionalization, and dichotomous disenfranchisement indices. Yet this analysis is presented crisply, and there are plenty of well-chosen snippets from commentators including Mario Vargas Llosa and Amartya Sen. The discussion embraces not only the costs of translation and Joseph Greenberg’s classic attempts to quantify diversity, but also the quirks of Finnish private investors and the Eurovision Song Contest.

Read the full review (Scroll down).

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UPI: Infants: Public insurance better, cheaper

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date December 9, 2011

The news wire service United Press International has covered the research of SMU economist Manan Roy, a doctoral candidate and adjunct professor in the SMU Department of Economics.

Roy analyzed new federal data about insured infants to compare public health insurance with private health insurance. Her analysis found that among the insured, infants in low-income families are better off under the nation’s government-funded public health insurance than infants covered by private insurance.

Read the full story.

EXCERPT:

SAN DIEGO, Dec. 8 (UPI) — Public health insurance coverage for infants is more comprehensive and costs less than private health insurance plans, a U.S. researcher found.

Study author Manan Roy, a Ph.D. student and an adjunct professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, said in the national debate over the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act — which requires all Americans to have health insurance — it’s widely assumed private health insurance can do a better job than the public insurance funded by the U.S. government.

Infants covered under Medicaid and its sister program — CHIP — come mostly from lower-income families who are more likely to be unmarried, younger, less educated, poor and disadvantaged, while infants covered by private health insurance are mostly from white and are generally more advantaged, Roy said.

“Public health insurance gets a lot of bad press,” Roy said in a statement. “But for infants who are covered by health insurance, the government-funded insurance appears to be more efficient than private health insurance — and can actually provide better care at a lower cost.”

Read the full story.

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Public health insurance provides insured infants better, less costly care than private plans

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date December 6, 2011
1 Comment on Public health insurance provides insured infants better, less costly care than private plans

Surprising result from first-of-its-kind study builds on earlier research that found public health insurance coverage is more comprehensive and costs less than private plans

In the fierce national debate over a new federal law that requires all Americans to have health insurance, it’s widely assumed that private health insurance can do a better job than the public insurance funded by the U.S. government.

But a first-of-its-kind analysis of newly available government data found just the opposite when it comes to infants covered by insurance.

Among the insured, infants in low-income families are better off under the nation’s government-funded public health insurance than infants covered by private insurance, says economist and study author Manan Roy, Southern Methodist University, Dallas. The finding emerged from an analysis that was weighted for the fact that less healthy infants are drawn into public health insurance from birth by its low cost.

SMU Researcher to study human-fire-climate interactions

The finding is surprising, says Roy, because the popular belief is that private health insurance always provides better coverage. Roy’s analysis, however, found public health insurance is a better option — and not only for low-income infants.

“Public health insurance gets a lot of bad press,” says Roy. “But for infants who are covered by health insurance, the government-funded insurance appears to be more efficient than private health insurance — and can actually provide better care at a lower cost.”

Why?

“Private health insurance plans vary widely,” Roy says. “Many don’t include basic services. So infants on more affordable plans may not be covered for immunizations, prescription drugs, for vision or dental care, or even basic preventive care.”

The U.S. doesn’t have a system of universal health insurance. But the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act signed into law by President Obama on March 23, 2010, requires all Americans to have health insurance. The act also expands government-paid free or low-cost Medicaid insurance to 133 percent of the federal poverty level.

“Given the study’s surprising outcome, it’s likely that the impact of national reforms to bring more children under public health insurance will substantially improve the health of infants who are in the worst health to begin with,” Roy says. “It’s likely to also help infants who aren’t low-income.”

Roy presented her study, “How Well Does the U.S. Government Provide Health Insurance?” at the 2011 Western Economic Association International Conference, San Diego. Roy is a Ph.D. student and an adjunct professor in SMU’s Department of Economics.

Study weighted to account for less healthy infants in public health insurance
A large body of previous research has established that insured infants are healthier than uninsured infants. Roy’s study appears to be the first of its kind to look only at insured infants to determine which kind of insurance has the most impact on infant health — private or public.

Roy found:

Infants covered by public insurance are mostly from disadvantaged backgrounds. Those under Medicaid and its sister program — CHIP — come mostly from lower-income families. Their parents — usually black and Hispanic — are more likely to be unmarried, younger and less educated. Economists refer to this statistical phenomenon — when a group consists primarily of people with specific characteristics — as strong positive or negative selection. In the case of public health insurance, strong negative selection is at work because it draws people who are poor and disadvantaged.
Infants on public health insurance are slightly less healthy than infants on private insurance. On average they had a lower five-minute Apgar score and shorter gestation age compared to privately insured infants. They were less likely to have a normal birth weight and normal Apgar score range, and were less likely to be born near term.
Infants covered by private health insurance are mostly from white or Asian families and are generally more advantaged. They are from higher-income families, with older parents who are usually married and more educated. Their mothers weigh less than those of infants on public insurance. This demonstrates strong positive selection of wealthier families into private health insurance.
Roy then compared the effect of public insurance on infant health in relation to private health insurance. To do that, she used an established statistical methodology that allows economists to factor negative or positive selection into the type of insurance. In comparing public vs. private insurance — allowing for strong negative selection into public health care — a different picture emerged.

“The results showed that it’s possible to attribute the entire detrimental effect of public health insurance to the negative selection that draws less healthy infants into public health insurance,” Roy says.

In fact, in a most striking revelation, allowing for a modest to significant amount of negative selection of infants into public health insurance, Roy’s findings suggest that among the insured population of infants, private health insurance is detrimental to child health.

“The real surprise with these findings is that despite a less healthy population — due to the negative factors created by poverty — public health insurance is actually improving the health of these infants,” Roy says.

Public health insurance provides more comprehensive benefits
The findings are less surprising upon deeper analysis.

A previous study by the nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities sheds light on Roy’s research. That group found that public health insurance provides more comprehensive benefits than private insurance. For example, all children on Medicaid and CHIP receive preventive and primary medical care, inpatient and outpatient care, pediatric vaccines, laboratory and X-ray services, prescription drugs, immunizations, and dental, vision and mental health care coverage.
The Medical Expenditure Panel Survey collected by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services found that on a per person basis, government-provided health insurance for children under 4 years old is cheaper on average compared to private health insurance plans.

“Enrollees in private health insurance can choose from a wide variety of plans,” Roy says. “Those who cut their costs by purchasing less coverage are reducing their access to quality care, including basic services like preventive care, prescription drugs, and vision and dental care.”

Roy says she can only speculate why infants from advantaged and disadvantaged families differ in their health outcomes. It’s possible that infants from families that are better off have access to better nutrition, a healthier lifestyle and possibly safer, cleaner neighborhoods than those from poorer backgrounds.

“Poor families and their infants may be subsisting on cheap food, for example, which tends to be fatty and less nutritious,” Roy says, “and that translates to worse health.”

Study relied on new U.S. government data on thousands of infants
Roy’s statistical analysis drew on data from more than 7,500 infants born in 2001. The data were the most recent available from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort, released by the National Center for Education Statistics, U.S. Department of Education.

The Early Childhood Longitudinal Study follows children born in the United States from birth through the start of kindergarten. Children are from diverse socioeconomic and racial/ethnic backgrounds. Data were gathered from parents, teachers and providers of child care and early education.

Data collected cover children’s health, care, education and cognitive, social, emotional and physical development over time. Included are standard infant health measures like length, infant weight, five-minute Apgar score, and the number of weeks the child was in the womb, which is considered an indicator of birth weight.

Poor families living at or below 185 percent of the federal poverty level represented 49 percent of Roy’s data set.

Demand for public health insurance has increased during the past decade, says Roy, while demand for private insurance has declined. Specifically, between 1999 and 2009 there was an increase in the overall proportion of children under 3 years of age who were insured. Of those, the proportion covered by private insurance declined. The proportion covered by public health insurance increased.

Other researchers have firmly established that infants who are covered by health insurance have timely access to quality care, Roy says. Expanding access could reduce, for example, the number of infants born with low birth weight, which is associated with chronic medical diseases like diabetes, hypertension and heart disease in adulthood. Low birth weight also has been linked to lower average scores on tests of intellectual and social development.

The United States has the highest infant mortality rate among developed nations due to low birth weight and is the only industrialized nation without universal health insurance. The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear a legal challenge to the Obama administration’s new law requiring everyone have health insurance. — Margaret Allen

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Culture, Society & Family Economics & Statistics

A mathematical model determines which nations are more stable and which are more likely to break up

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date November 18, 2011
1 Comment on A mathematical model determines which nations are more stable and which are more likely to break up

Thanks to a new model created by an international research group it is now possible to predict which European countries are more likely to become united or which are more likely to break up. It does so by not only considering demographic and economic criteria but, most ingeniously of all, culture and genetics.

Southern Methodist University economist Shlomo Weber was a member of the team and co-author of the study that was published in the Journal of Economic Growth.

The scientists said their method quantitatively analyzes the stability and disintegration of European nations. It also estimates the implicit benefits of a larger European Union or, in other words, what would happen if the EU were one country. They also give empirical support for the use of genetics as an indicator of cultural heterogeneity amongst nations.

Besides Weber, other researchers included scientists from the Carlos III University of Madrid, the Toulouse School of Economics in France and the New Moscow School of Economics in Russia.

It has always been common knowledge that the more nations that join together in unity, the greater the profits, said Ignacio Ortuño Ortín, a researcher at the University of Madrid. This is because the market gets bigger and costs are shared. On the other hand, when many regions or countries are brought together there is a difference in populations, both economically and culturally. This, in turn, implies a high cost. There was a need for methodology that quantitatively analyzes these two aspects using specific cases.

Case study: Yugoslavia’s economic, cultural differences played role in instability
The mathematical model the researchers put forward includes factors such as a country’s wealth alongside size and cultural differences in terms of population genetics. According to the experts, the most difficult aspect to quantify when making predictions is the “measurement” of countries from a cultural point of view. “We take population genetics data and then use it to support the fact that such genetic distance between regions can be used as a good tool when approaching cultural distance,” Ortuño said.

According to the scientists, this does not suggest that genetics explains culture but that there is a correlation between the two. This means that populations that have intermixed more will also display greater cultural similarity. “We are not saying that genes explain the way a person thinks,” clarifies Ortuño.

In order to put consistency of their model to the test, a real-life case was chosen: the disintegration of Yugoslavia. The authors of the study found that the economic differences between its republics determined the order of disintegration – a fact that coincided with their model. Likewise, cultural differences, although small, played a key role in triggering instability.

Predictions for other countries
The model’s first theoretical predictions were made by pairing two countries based on the hypothetical situation of Europe being a single country and on the regions that are more prone to separate from their current nation.

If the European Union were to become stronger and had a common fiscal as well as monetary policy (both of which together would turn it into a single country), in the long run, Greece and Portugal would benefit the most. In terms of percentages, Portugal would benefit from an increase in wealth of 13 percent, Greece would see an increase of 11.9 percent, Ireland with 8.9 percent and Finland with 8 percent. Spain would see a growth of 4.1 percent whereas those countries that would benefit least would be Germany, followed by Italy and then France.

The researchers have also predicted what regions have more incentives to separate from the nations to which they belong. “We are not suggesting that it would be beneficial for these regions to separate but it is true that, in relative terms, the Basque Country and Scotland have more incentives,” they claim.

According to the model, those that are more inclined to pair up would be Austria and Switzerland, Denmark and Norway, and France and Great Britain. Spain would be more interested in uniting with France but “this does not necessarily mean that France would be interested in uniting with Spain,” says Ortuño. He adds that “we avoid taking the strategic decisions of countries into account. This means that our model predicts how much a country would benefit if a union were to occur.”

The team is currently working on a new project with collaborators in Moscow who are applying the same method to understand the stability of regions in Russia. — Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology

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Surprising result from first-of-its-kind study builds on earlier research that found public health insurance coverage is more comprehensive and costs less than private plans

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