comparative value priorities of chinese and new zealand

a decrease in annual economic growth. They then applied this finding to Africa,
reasoning that, because African countries are typically ethnically diverse, the strong link
between ethnic heterogeneity and slow growth was quite likely an important part of the
explanation for that region’s growth tragedy. Alesina, Devleeschauwer, Easterly, Kurlat
and Wacziarg (2003) retested the correlations and found that moving from complete
ethnic homogeneity (0.0) to complete heterogeneity (1.0) depresses annual growth by
1.9 percentage points. For example, up to 1.77 percentage points in annual growth of the
difference in annual growth between South Korea and Uganda can be explained by
different degrees of ethnic fractionalisation. Alesina et al. found linguistic
fractionalisation to be strongly inversely related to economic growth, but religious
fractionalisation is not. The correlations Alesina et al. found were, economic growth
with ethnic fractionalisation, -0.471, with language, -.305, and with religion, -0.103.
Ultimately, it is difficult to evaluate precisely the effect size of religio-socio-ethnolinguistic
fractionalisation due to the strong correlation of the variables with other
variables with explanatory potential. Positive or negative perception of fractionalisation
is moderated by degree of ethnocentrism of the perceiver. Horowitz (1985) pointed out,
relating to African tribes, “An Ibo may be ... an Owerri Ibo or an Onitsha Ibo in what
was the Eastern region of Nigeria. In Lagos, he is simply an Ibo. In London, he is a
Nigerian. In New York, he is an African.” The interactions amongst peoples of differing
civilizations enhance the civilization-consciousness of people. In turn, these interactions
bring to salience differences and animosities stretching, or thought to stretch back deep
into history (Huntington, 1993), intensifying the ideas of them and us. Alesina,
Devleeschauwer, Easterly, Kurlat and Wacziarg (2003) provide recent estimates of
ethno-religio-linguistic fractionalization for 190 countries.
The use of the nation as a cultural construct is considered by some as a fallacy. For
example, Egri and Ralston (2004), Littrell, Alon, and Chan (2006), and Ralston, Yu,
Wang, Terpstra and He (1996) find that China has some as yet unknown number of
culture areas where residents have distinctly different patterns of emphasis on cultural
and individual values. Given this situation, this project will compare a defined region in
China, Guangzhou City and Guangdong Province with a defined region, New Zealand,
though New Zealand is problematic as a single culture area. See Figure 4.4 for the
countries sampled in this study. The differences indicate an expectation of differences in
cultural values for China and New Zealand from Alesina et al. (2003).
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