Cultural Diversity Within a Country and Cultural Similarity Between Countries:An Effect of International Trade

Abstract

We present an evolutionary model of cultural change to investigate how international trade promotes a “cosmopolitan culture,” which is a mixture of local cultures. We find there is a stable stationary state in which both a cosmopolitan culture and a local culture coexist within a trading country. We interpret this as a theoretical reproduc-tion of what is often observed: cultural diversity within a country and cultural simi larity between countries. However, this result is dependent on the way in which parents transmit their cultural type to their children. When parents have perfect empathy with their children, local culture may go extinct due to international trade.