How Much Should You Pay to Speak Esperanto? Quantifying Cultural Impacts on Trade through Wikipedia Network Statistics

Abstract

Culture shapes how populations interact, and groups with more similar cultures face less frictions to cooperate. This, in turn, affects trade patterns and institutional diffusion, implying a society’s culture plays a crucial role in the causes of economic growth. However, operationalizing cultural traits are challenging. We develop a new systematic measure through network analysis of Wikipedia. Connectivity statistics over the encyclopedia’s hyperlink-directed network capture unique features of cultural relatedness. Further, as we index pages, we can coarsen the network into specific topics (e.g., cuisine, language, fashion). We aim these cultural proxies at OECD country trading patterns. The results show how culture correlates broadly over trade pattern data, and sheds insight into the impact of variety of cultural dimensions on the cooperation between populations.