Do East Asian ancestry and Productivity (TFP) go together across countries?

Across 114 countries the link before adjusting for anything is r = -0.05, on a scale from -1 (opposite) to +1 (in step). A version that uses only each country's rank gives +0.10.

Does the link hold within countries over time, not just across countries?

There are not enough years of data within countries to check this over time.

Does East Asian ancestry cause Productivity (TFP)?

This analysis cannot answer that. It shows only that the two go together. A link between two country measures, adjusted or not, does not show that either one changes the other. Country figures also say nothing about individual people.

East Asian ancestry vs. Productivity (TFP)

Holds up after adjusting for income

A country is not a person, and ancestry is not destiny. Countries where more people have ancestors from one part of the world also tend to differ on the other measure, and that is all. It does notfollow that people with that ancestry are the people with the different score. Making that leap is called the ecological fallacy: reading a pattern across places as a fact about individual people. Ancestry also goes very closely with region and with history, including colonisation and the Atlantic slave trade, and with national income. So much of what looks like ancestry here is really those. That is what the adjusted figures and the region-by-region view are for. The shares are one estimate, for around the year 2000, of where people’s ancestors lived in 1500, not how anyone identifies.

Across 114 countries, East Asian ancestry and Productivity (TFP) rise and fall together at r = -0.05 (on a scale from −1 to +1, where 0 means no link). There is almost no link to explain.

Comparing countries across the middle half of East Asian ancestry, 0% to 0.775% of population, productivity (TFP) is worse by 0.00031 ratio to the US at the top of that range than the bottom. Comparing only countries with similar national income, the gap is 0.00083 ratio to the US.

Link before adjusting (r)-0.053p = 0.575 · 114 countries

After adjusting for national income-0.223p = 0.017 · likely range [-0.39, -0.04]

p, allowing for regions0.000standard error 0.025 · 7 regions

Check for luck (q)0.006across 18,622 pairs

How to read these.r runs from −1 (one goes up as the other goes down) to +1 (they rise together), and 0 means no link. Adjusting for national income means comparing countries with the same GDP per person, so differences in wealth can’t explain the link. Income is used in percentage terms, since an extra $1,000 means more to a poor country than to a rich one. p is how likely a link this strong would be if there were really none. Below 0.05 means it is unlikely to be chance. Very small values are written in short form: 1.1e-32 means a decimal point followed by 31 zeros and then 11, so very close to zero. The likely range is where the true figure probably lies, and a range that crosses zero means the link could easily be chance. Countries in the same region tend to resemble each other, so the third figure allows for that, which gives a fairer p. The standard error is the typical size of the error in r. Finally, testing this many pairs means some will look strong by luck alone. A q below 0.05 means this link is unlikely to be one of those.

East Asian ancestry · % of populationlink with income +0.24 · independent

Productivity (TFP) · ratio to the US (US = 1)link with income +0.79 · high

“Link with income” is how closely each measure tracks GDP per person across countries, from −1 to +1.

Every country as a dot

best-fit line line after adjusting

Four ways to measure the link

Method	r	p	Countries
Standard (Pearson), not adjusted	-0.053	0.575	114
By rank (Spearman), not adjusted	+0.097	0.306	114
Standard (Pearson), adjusted for national income	-0.223	0.017	114
By rank (Spearman), adjusted for national income	-0.168	0.076	114

The rank version uses only each country’s place in line, from lowest to highest, so a few extreme countries count for less. The adjusted and unadjusted versions use the same 114 countries: those that report both measures and GDP per person. So the gap between them comes from the adjustment, not from a change in which countries are counted. Drop in the size of r after adjusting: -0.170 (a minus sign means it grew).

How solid is it?

Leaving out one country at a time, r ranges from -0.242 (without QAT) to -0.196 (without CHN). The bar above shows that range on a scale from −1 to +1, with the solid line at the full result. The single country that moves r most: CHN (+0.028).

Fragile: this link may not hold up.

correlation moves sharply once outliers are trimmed
direction is not consistent across regions

Within each region

Countries are not separate, unrelated cases, and neighbors share a lot. A link that holds inside each region is far more believable than one that shows up only when comparing regions.

	n	r
East Asia & Pacific	14	-0.83
Europe & Central Asia	38	+0.09
Latin America & Caribbean	19	-0.54
Middle East, North Africa, Afghanistan & Pakistan	12	-0.38
Sub-Saharan Africa	27	+0.30

By income third

If the link shows up only in the richest third of countries, it is a feature of rich countries, not a general pattern.

	n	r
Poorest third	38	-0.11
Middle third	38	-0.25
Richest third	38	-0.26

By largest religious group

Countries grouped by a label they share, such as main religion, rather than by a number. Groups of fewer than twelve countries are not shown. These groups differ in income, region and history all at once. So a gap between them is a place to start asking questions, not an answer.

	n	r
Christians	73	+0.03
Muslims	25	-0.15

By last European coloniser

	n	r
France	12	-0.50
Never a European colony	12	-0.45
Spain	18	-0.02
United Kingdom	32	-0.02

By official ideology

	n	r
Nationalist	15	+0.26
No strong official ideology	82	-0.27

By party system

	n	r
A few parties banned	15	-0.16
No parties banned	88	-0.26

Without outliers (countries far outside the middle half of countries on either measure, by more than one and a half times the width of that middle half): r = -0.065 after dropping 21 countries.

Two series, one country

Both measures over the years for one country you pick. The two charts are stacked so they share only the years along the bottom.

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Over time, within countries

Everything above compares countries with each other at one moment. This section compares each country only with itself over 0years. So a link here can’t come from anything about a country that stays the same, such as its history, geography, institutions or culture.

Not enough history inside each country to look at this over time. That needs countries measured for several years in a row, and at least one of these measures is measured too rarely.

The data

	% of population	ratio to the US (US = 1)	Years
Thailand THA	100%	0.578	2000, 2023
Philippines PHL	100%	0.466	2000, 2023
Lao PDR LAO	100%	0.433	2000, 2023
Korea, Rep. KOR	100%	0.661	2000, 2023
Japan JPN	100%	0.64	2000, 2023
Indonesia IDN	100%	0.449	2000, 2023
Hong Kong SAR, China HKG	100%	0.772	2000, 2023
China CHN	100%	0.471	2000, 2023
Mongolia MNG	98.2%	0.467	2000, 2023
Malaysia MYS	92.5%	0.637	2000, 2023
Singapore SGP	92%	0.833	2000, 2023
Fiji FJI	52.8%	0.722	2000, 2023
New Zealand NZL	18.5%	0.879	2000, 2023
Australia AUS	7.1%	0.847	2000, 2023
Canada CAN	5.59%	0.809	2000, 2023

Putterman, L. and Weil, D. N. (2010), 'Post-1500 Population Flows and the Long-Run Determinants of Economic Growth and Inequality', Quarterly Journal of Economics 125(4); World Migration Matrix version 1.1 (2009).
Feenstra, Robert C., Robert Inklaar and Marcel P. Timmer (2015), "The Next Generation of the Penn World Table", American Economic Review, 105(10), 3150-3182, www.ggdc.net/pwt. Data: Penn World Table version 11.0, Groningen Growth and Development Centre, doi:10.34894/FABVLR.

Sources

East Asian ancestry

East Asian and Pacific ancestry (share of the population)

Louis Putterman and David N. Weil, Brown University · No licence stated; used with citation · updated one edition (version 1.1, 2009)

The estimated share of today's population whose ancestors in the year 1500 lived in East Asia, Southeast Asia or the Pacific. This is the closest thing to race shares that can be compared across countries: national censuses each use their own race and ethnic categories, and most countries record none. It is about where people's ancestors lived, not how anyone identifies, and it is one estimate for around the year 2000, built from history, migration records and genetic studies. Every country's six ancestry shares add up to 100%, so they are linked to each other by arithmetic. No "better" direction is set.

Productivity (TFP)

Total factor productivity level, compared with the US (Penn World Table)

Groningen Growth and Development Centre, University of Groningen · via DataverseNL · CC BY 4.0 · updated irregular (new versions every few years)

Total factor productivity (TFP) is how much a country produces compared with what its workers, their schooling, and its machines and buildings would be expected to produce. It is the part of GDP that those inputs do not account for, such as better technology or better organisation. The US is set to 1 in every year, so 0.5 means a country gets about half as much output from the same inputs as the US. It is worked out from GDP, capital, the number of workers, their schooling and the labor share, so it is linked to each of them by arithmetic. It is left out of the economy score: being built from GDP, it would turn that score back into GDP per person.

How this was computed

Data used: most recent value in 2010-2025; values come from 2000–2023. To adjust for income, each measure is first predicted from GDP per person (in percentage terms, on a log scale) with a straight-line fit. Only what is left over is then compared. This is called a partial correlation. The line is drawn the standard way (ordinary least squares), which picks the line that comes closest to all the countries at once. The error margins allow for countries in the same region resembling each other, using 7 World Bank regions. The q-value corrects for testing all 18,622 pairs at once, using the Benjamini–Hochberg method. Underlying data last updated V-Dem v16; V-Party v2. How the country data works · explore East Asian ancestry and Productivity (TFP)

This page shows that two measures go together. It does not show that East Asian ancestry changes Productivity (TFP), or the reverse. These figures also describe countries, not individual people. See the ecological fallacy.