Tolerance and economic growth revisited: a note
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Tolerance and economic growth revisited: a note Eduard J. Bomhoff · Grace Hooi Yean Lee
Received: 2 November 2011 / Accepted: 11 September 2012 / Published online: 19 October 2012 © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2012
Abstract Berggren and Elinder (BE) in this journal write on the relationship between the degree of tolerance in a nation and its rate of economic growth. They are disturbed to find in their cross sections that faster economic growth statistically goes together with intolerance of homosexuals. In this comment, we revisit the issue and demonstrate that the concern expressed by BE is unwarranted if we properly account for “conditional convergence” in the regressions for economic growth. Other things being equal, a country grows faster if it starts from a poorer initial position. In the BE dataset, China since the Deng reforms is a prime example. At about the same time, another group of countries managed to accelerate their economic growth after a long period of stagnation: the ex-communist countries in central and Eastern Europe. Many of these nations also grew exceptionally fast for a number of years, once freedom had been regained and the initial chaos overcome. With simple modeling of these historical initial conditions, we find no statistical pattern that associates bias against homosexuals with weaker economic growth. Our results are robust under alternative specifications. Keywords Tolerance · Growth JEL Classification O40 · Z13
1 Introduction A recent article in this journal by Berggren and Elinder (2011) (hereafter BE) focuses on the association between the degree of tolerance of sexual preferences in different countries and economic growth. BE focus on analyzing responses to one of two questions in the World Values Survey (WVS) about tolerance for homosexuality and find that countries with less
This comment refers to the article available at doi:10.1007/s11127-010-9702-x. E.J. Bomhoff · G.H.Y. Lee () Department of Economics, School of Business, Monash University Sunway Campus, Jalan Lagoon Selatan, Bandar Sunway, 46150 Selangor, Malaysia e-mail: [email protected]
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Public Choice (2012) 153:487–494
tolerant attitudes on average exhibit stronger economic growth. As they note, such a result would contradict the popular writings of Richard Florida (2005), who has argued that successful cities need a culture that is welcoming of gays and especially of their contributions to the creative areas of the urban economy (also see Marlet and Woerkens 2007). BE are distressed by their conclusion and write that “one may very well advocate tolerance toward homosexuals in spite of this finding [of a negative relationship between the degree of tolerance and growth], as there are other, and to many people more important, goals than growth”.1 BE argue that productive and innovative people who are sexually prejudiced would refrain from moving into tolerant places. Staying in places with more tolerance towards homosexuality would reduce their productivity. BE have very kindly provided their rich
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