Economists: Ancestral history explains roots of income inequality

Two Brown University economists have created a new data set explaining differences in the world's current per capita gross domestic products (GDPs). In a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, Louis Putterman and David N. Weil introduce a "World Migration Matrix" showing that inequality among countries can be largely explained by where the ancestors of each country's people lived some 500 years ago. "What matters is the history of the people who live in a country today, more than the history of the country itself," they say.

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