کد مقاله کد نشریه سال انتشار مقاله انگلیسی نسخه تمام متن
5067553 1372604 2007 19 صفحه PDF دانلود رایگان
عنوان انگلیسی مقاله ISI
Languages in the European Union: The quest for equality and its cost
موضوعات مرتبط
علوم انسانی و اجتماعی اقتصاد، اقتصادسنجی و امور مالی اقتصاد و اقتصادسنجی
پیش نمایش صفحه اول مقاله
Languages in the European Union: The quest for equality and its cost
چکیده انگلیسی

The European Union has recently expanded from 15 to 25 countries, bringing the number of official languages to 20. Currently, the EU extends equal treatment to all member countries' official languages. This, however, is costly, especially since many Europeans speak one of the procedural languages, English, French or German, either as a native or a foreign language. We develop a simple theoretical model of linguistic-regime choice in a multilingual society and apply the model's insights to the case of the EU: we compute disenfranchisement rates that would result from using only the three procedural languages for all EU business and then proceed to quantify the average cost per person and cost per disenfranchised person associated with providing translations and interpreting into the remaining languages. Both the disenfranchisement rates and costs are shown to vary substantially across the different languages, raising important questions about the economic efficiency of equal treatment for all languages. We argue that an efficient solution would be to decentralize the provision of translations.

ناشر
Database: Elsevier - ScienceDirect (ساینس دایرکت)
Journal: European Economic Review - Volume 51, Issue 6, August 2007, Pages 1351-1369
نویسندگان
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