Economic, educational, and IQ gains in eastern Germany 1990–2006

Two Italies? Genes, intelligence and the Italian North–South economic divide

“…Given the magnitude of variations, the comparative performances of the Northern and the Southern areas may not, furthermore, be explained by differences in the shares of immigrant students, even though their share is higher in Northern Italy (Cornoldi et al, 2013). Notably, these trends are consistent to those observed at the international level for IQs (Flynn, 2012), for scholastic achievement tests (Meisenberg & Woodley, 2013), and for regional IQs (Roivainen, 2012). All in all, existing evidence supports the idea that interregional disparities in school achievement test scores do not reflect inherited differences in average intelligence.…”

“…At the regional level, the case of Germany presents some analogies with that of the Italian regions. In the course of the 1990s, after reunification, previous differences in IQ between East and West German conscripts rapidly diminished, given the strong gains, of 0.5 IQ points per annum, recorded for East German conscripts (Roivainen, 2012). It does not result that former East and West Germans had any genetic differences but, rather, they lived in diverse socio-economic and institutional contexts.…”

“…The German case indicates, instead, how institutional changes and improvement of socioeconomic conditions may exert a powerful effect on measured cognitive abilities (Roivainen, 2012). Similarly to what happened in Italy, where less developed regions have had greater improvement in mean test scores, also at the international level gains in mean IQs, and in scholastic achievement scores are related to the modernization stages of nations: IQ gains are higher for those countries that begin the modernization process, and lower, negligible or even negative, for developed nations (Nisbett et al, 2012, p. 11;Meisenberg & Woodley, 2013).…”

European and American WAIS IV norms: Cross‐national differences in perceptual reasoning, processing speed and working memory subtest scores

“…However, this is not the case for Finland, Scandinavia and France, where IQ scores have remained stagnant since the 1990s (Dutton & Lynn, 2015;Koivunen, 2007;Sundet, Barlaug & Torjussen, 2004;Teasdale & Owen, 2008). In Germany, a large-scale study on conscripts showed stagnant IQ scores in Western Germany (À1.2 IQ points) but robust IQ gains (4 points) in Eastern Germany over the years 1990-1998 (Ebenrett & Puzicha, 1999;Roivainen, 2012). The differences in the magnitude of the Flynn effect between subtests are fairly small.…”

Differences in the intelligence of children across thirty-one provinces and municipalities of China and their economic and social correlates

“…The positive associations between regional differences in IQs within countries and per capita incomes have been reported in a number of studies of other countries including for 13 regions of the British Isles (r = 0.73) (Lynn, 1979), 90 regions of France (r = 0.61) (Lynn, 1980), 12 regions of Italy (r = 0.94) (Lynn, 2010), 19 regions of Italy (r = 0.98) (Templer, 2012), 18 regions of Spain (r = 0.42) (Lynn, 2012), 16 regions of Germany (r = 0.79) (Roivainen, 2012) and 12 regions of the United Kingdom (general factor of economic development: r = 0.72; weekly earnings: r = 0.42) (Carl, 2016).…”