There is debate between the possible influence of a country diversity ratio on its economic performance. In this interesting Canadian article the author ( a university professor) argues that Canada’s high diversity causes an economic weakness: ‘Actually, evidence shows ‘diversity’ makes countries weaker — not stronger‘. On the other hand, we also know a lot of circumstantial evidence that diversity brings major benefits to a community.
The first step is to observe countries’ diversity indicators. The result can be surprising, for example I discovered that France is rather low on the ethnic fragmentation / diversity index (although that might be different in Paris region – one of the economic centers). Canada appears to be very high, quite higher than the US (but then again it would be interesting to know how the San Francisco area fares in that respect, with also high economic growth and high diversity created by the influx of workers).
The author then quotes studies that have shown that social fragmentation creates lower economic performance. One can observe that ethnic diversity is not necessarily related to social fragmentation, which can be created by other reasons such as income inequality. Therefore, fragmentation can certainly impact economic growth, but the relation with ethnic fragmentation can be questioned.
Anyway those issues are quite interesting to observe inasmuch as ethnic diversity is rather prone to increase in the Collaborative Age as globalization will increase.
