earticle

영어

We explore both direct and indirect effects linguistic diversity may produce on the labor market outcomes, in particular unemployment. For this purpose we use a measure of linguistic diversity that takes account of the languages’ mutual intelligibility and a sample of seventeen East and South Asian countries to test the hypotheses of skill complementarity, ethnocentric behavior, social cohesion, and political aspirations. The latter two hypotheses correspond to the indirect effects of linguistic diversity on unemployment working through the educational system that encourages social integration of the minority language groups on the one hand, while increasing the risk of social conflict due to the ethnolinguistic differences. We find significant support for the hypotheses of ethnocentric behavior and political aspirations with the exception of primary school graduates for whom there is evidence of skill complementarities effect at work.