Consanguineous Marriages on Political Instability, Economic Development and Growth: An Empirical Analysis

Abstract

The effects of consanguineous marriages through genes have strong impacts not only on human capital, but also on political stability through the process that consanguineous marriages alter the sociological structure. Nevertheless, these types of marriages were abandoned by the developed nations at the beginning of the 19th century, although these types of marriages are prefered today in many Asian and African countries. In these countries, the traditional structure could not be broken; a twosome structure is created within the country, within cities, within different regions as well as between regions and between countries. Political stability fails to be achieved in these countries. The twosome structure promotes political instability and bad economic peformances. It is observed that, the countries with high consanguineous marriages experience different sociological and economic factors so that the motives towards individualism considered as an important source of industrial development fail to flourish. An important result of the twosome structure is on human capital investments and on economic development. We followed a different approach in analyzing economic development in accordance with consanguineous marriage and political instability in accordance with human capital investments and economic development. In the study, we analyzed 53 countries; we collected and compiled most recent data of consanguineous marriages, literacy rates and political risk as an indicator of political instability. We calculated GDP per capita growth rates between 1900 and 2003. We grouped countries according to their consanguineous marriage rates. Empirical results show that, the group of developed economies overcome consanguineous marriages before 1900 and achieved political stability, high human capital investments and steady growth rates. On the other hand, the countries practicing high consanguineous marriage rates are less immune to political instability and experience negative growth rates and very low human capital investments. The group of countries that lowered their consanguineous marriage rates below 10 % just before 1980, achieved very rapid economic growth afterwards. Empirical analysis based on factor analysis, correlation and covariance matrices suggest that countries with high consanguineous marriages experience high political instability and fall behind in the process of economic development.