ROMAIN WACZIARG FINDS LINK BETWEEN GENETIC DISTANCE AND INCOME
DIFFERENCES Study provides new perspective on technology
adoption Why are some countries rich and others poor? Much has
been written on this question from a historical perspective,
says UCLA Anderson Associate Professor Romain Wacziarg.
"Countries that were colonized and populated by Europeans are
generally more economically developed than countries that were
not colonized, or were colonized but not populated by
Europeans," he says. Wacziarg thought this might have to do with
the links between developed countries and Northwestern Europe,
where the Industrial Revolution originated. "In particular," he
says, "with the fact that the colonizers who settled in these
regions had been close to the industrial breakthroughs of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries." So Wacziarg and Enrico
Spolaore of Tufts University began looking at the long term
determinants of economic performance by countries -- measured by
per-capita income. The main hypothesis of t