Family Types and the Persistence of Regional Disparities in Europe

abstract

This article examines the association between one of the most basic institutional forms, the family, and a series of demographic, educational, social, and economic indicators across regions in Europe. Using Emmanuel Todd’s classification of medieval European family systems, we identify potential links between family types and regional disparities in household size, educational attainment, social capital, labor participation, sectoral structure, wealth, and inequality. The results indicate that medieval family structures seem to have influenced European regional disparities in virtually every indicator that we considered. That these links remain, despite the influence of the modern state and population migration, suggests that such structures are either extremely resilient or in the past were internalized within other social and economic institutions as they developed.

Keywords:

• institutions
• family types
• education
• social capital
• labor force participation
• economic wealth and dynamism
• regions
• Europe

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Alejandra Castrodad-RodrÍguez for outstanding assistance with GIS and to Thomas Farole, Gernot Grabher, four anonymous referees, and participants in seminars at the Universities of Cambridge, Oxford, Warwick, and Paris for their valuable comments on earlier versions of the article. Duranton gratefully acknowledges financial support from the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, and RodrÍguez-Pose acknowledges financial support from Prociudad-CM. The work was also part of the research program of the independent U.K. Spatial Economics Research Centre, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, Communities and Local Government, and the Welsh Assembly Government. The views expressed are ours and do not represent those of the funders.

Notes

1 Our results are not sensitive to these two minor changes.

2 To create the adapted map presented in Figure 2, we used the following boundary data sets: Continental Europe and Ireland: ESRI (2004): “Europe Basemap: Level 1 and 2 Provinces.” In ESRI Data and Maps—World, Europe, Canada, and Mexico (Level 1: Sweden, Luxemburg, Norway, Denmark, Netherlands, Austria; Level 2: Finland, Portugal, Ireland, Belgium, Switzerland, France, Germany, Italy, Spain). U.K.: Edina UKBORDERS (2004): English and Welsh Counties and Scottish Regions for 1981, based on data provided through EDINA UKBORDERS, with the support of the ESRC and JISC, and using boundary material (copyright of the Crown). NUTS Regions in the EU: GISCO (2003): “Administrative/NUTS Regions: NUEC1MV7,” in EU Boundaries CD ROM, Version 1.

3 Indeed, Greif (2006a, 309) argued that the domination of Europe by the nuclear family was under way as early as the eighth century.

4 Reher went on to argue that although the historical persistence of family structures is significant, the distinctions between stem and nuclear and egalitarian and hierarchical are unnecessary. Instead, a simpler distinction between weak family ties in northern Europe and strong family ties in southern Europe is all that is deemed necessary to explain the significant differences between the two areas (Reher 1998, 221). As we show, our results have some bearing on this debate.

5 The choice of the absolute nuclear family as our base category was motivated by the general belief that nuclear types are now the dominant forms of family structure (Greif 2006a, 2006b) and by the perception that absolute families are the most adequate family structure for the promotion of innovation, adaptability, and economic progress (Todd 1991; Greif 2006a).

6 We did not control for spatial autocorrelation because it is unclear, from a theoretical perspective, whether we could expect spillovers in this case. Were we to find some positive effects of the neighboring regions’ family types on regional performance, it is unlikely that family types would be the key factor behind that spatial dependence, as they could be masking other factors, such as market potential effects. In any case, the risk of spatial dependence in this case is either limited in space (RodrÍguez-Pose and Crescenzi 2008) or can be regarded as a secondary concern in comparison with specification issues (Briant, Combes, and Lafourcade 2008).

7 Defined as “intentionally created, voluntary, interest-based, and self-governed permanent associations” (Greif 2006a, 308).

8 The results of these regressions are available on request.

9 Regions were classified into those with a Catholic, Protestant, or Anglican majority, depending on the main religion of the population. Regions with a Protestant majority were used as the base category. The sources of our data were http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook, http://commons.wikimidia.org/wiki/Image:Europe_religion_map_de.png, and http://csi-int.org/world_map_europa_religion.php.