Research On Economic Effect Of Linguistic Capital And Policies

Against the backdrop of economic globalization,language is an important media and capital for international trade,financial flows and technological and information exchange.Effective language policies not only reduce linguistic barriers,but also exert spillover effect on its neighbors,facilitating trade,policy coordination and people-to-people connections under the"Belt and Road Initiative".Therefore,it's highly relevant to study the growth effect and cross-country spillover effect of linguistic capital as well as the causal link between language policies and economic growth.Based on past linguistic economic researches,the paper systematically studies linguistic role in economic growth and the causal link between language policies and economic outcome.First,from theoretical perspective,it points out that language is more than a communicative tool and cultural symbol.It's an indispensable capital for a country to engage in international specialization.Moreover,it builds the theoretical mechanism showing how language affects economic outcome and test such effect empirically based on China's OFDI through panel gravity model.The paper also combines linguistics and economics in an in-depth way by measuring not only distance between languages but also that between countries' linguistic landscape.By citing linguistic distance as weight matrix,it examines the spill-over effect of language on economic growth.What's more,the language policy is quantitatively evaluated from an economic perspective through synthetic control,and the causal relationship between language policy and economic effects is confirmed,so as to help the planning of long-term policies and the selection of short-term one with quantitative evaluation under BRI and the "Community of Shared Destiny"The study results in the following conclusions.Firstly,China's OFDI stock in a country is positively related to the linguistic capital of the country's official languages.As a crystallization of China's long-term language policy,language capital plays an active role in the "Going Global" process.From the economic perspective,it confirms the foresight of past language policies.Secondly,China's linguistic capital of the host country's official language promotes OFDI far more effectively than that of English,which means that language policy should shift as China's economic cooperation tilt towards developing countries.Thirdly,the spatial panel model with language distance as the weight matrix proves that the growth spillover effect brought by globalization is significant,which confirms the theoretical assumption that language links economic growths through trade,technology,culture,institutions and other channels.Fourthly,both theoretical models and empirical study has proved the-convergence among countries'growth.Fifthly,Singapore's language policy is used as an example to verify the causal relationship between such policies and economic outcomes.The counter-factual analysis shows that language policy has increased Singapore's per capita GDP by 23%.Sixth,Singapore mirrors the "community of shared destiny" with Chinese making the majority of the community.The language policy aims to promote common prosperity,harmonious development,thus fostering a sense of community identity in the process of cultural and economic integration.