The Words That Keep People Apart. Official Language, Accountability and Fiscal Capacity

Adelaide Baronchelli, Alessandra Foresta and Roberto Ricciuti

No 8437, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: This paper empirically evaluates the impact of accountability on fiscal capacity. We maintain that if the average citizen speaks a language different from the central government and the elite, she will find it difficult/impossible to hold the government to account. As a result, this will negatively affect fiscal capacity. We adopt an instrumental variable approach using, as an instrument, the measure of how far the official language differs from ordinary language. The first stage results suggest that this instrument is strong and reliable and is negatively correlated with our measure of accountability in line with the hypothesis. The results in the second stage support our hypothesis. The results are robust to plausible exogeneity tests and different specifications.

Keywords: language; accountability; fiscal capacity; insulation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C26 D02 D72 H20 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mac
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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