EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Ethnic Diversity and Poverty

Sefa Awaworyi Churchill and Russell Smyth

No 33-16, Monash Economics Working Papers from Monash University, Department of Economics

Abstract: We examine the relationship between ethnic diversity and poverty for a cross-sectional sample of 60 developing countries. We measure diversity using indices of ethnic and linguistic fractionalization, and measure poverty using the multidimensional poverty index (MPI), multidimensional poverty headcount (MPH), intensity of deprivation, poverty gap and poverty headcount ratio. We find that ethnic and linguistic fractionalization contributes to poverty levels. Specifically, we find that a standard deviation increase in ethnic fractionalization is associated with a 0.37, 0.83 and 0.77 standard deviation increase in the MPI, MPH and the intensity of deprivation, respectively. Moreover, a standard deviation increase in ethnic fractionalization is associated with between a 0.30 and 0.56 standard deviation increase in the population living below $1.90 and $3.10, the poverty gap at $1.90 and $3.10 a day and the headcount ratio at $1.90 and $3.10 a day. Similar results are also observed for linguistic fractionalization with standardized coefficients ranging between 0.31 and 0.91. We find that our results are robust to alternative ways to measure fractionalization and poverty as well as alternative approaches to address endogeneity.

Keywords: Ethnic diversity; poverty; fractionalization. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 40 pages
Date: 2016-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-gro
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.monash.edu/business/economics/research ... icchurchillsmyth.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Ethnic Diversity and Poverty (2017) Downloads
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:mos:moswps:2016-33

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://www.monash.e ... esearch/publications
ratbek.dzhumashev@monash.edu

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Monash Economics Working Papers from Monash University, Department of Economics Department of Economics, Monash University, Victoria 3800, Australia. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Simon Angus (simon.angus@monash.edu).

 
Page updated 2024-12-26
Handle: RePEc:mos:moswps:2016-33