The Cost of Nativism: Evidence from the Netherlands

Abstract

We study language preferences and how they relate to nativism, using the Netherlands, a typical high-income education-exporting country, as a case study. Against the oft-heard claim that education in the national language is preferrable, our pre-registered discrete choice experiment shows that natives have a precisely estimated zero willingness to pay for Dutch-language education, relative to English, with more universalist respondents willing to pay more for English. We quantify the effect of a language switch on the size of Dutch universities: switching from English to Dutch triggers an 8.6% contraction of the university sector. In turn, this contraction generates losses in scientific output equivalent to 1.1 - 1.6% of GDP, with only trivial gains in other domains. Our results highlight the massive costs of nativism.

Keywords: Language, Discrete Choice Experiments, Internationalization, Parochialism, Nativism, migration