Collective Action in Diverse Sierra Leone Communities

Rachel Glennerster, Edward Miguel and Alexander Rothenberg

No 16196, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Scholars have pointed to ethnic and other social divisions as a leading cause of economic underdevelopment, due in part to their adverse effects on public good provision and collective action. We investigate this issue in post-war Sierra Leone, one of the world's poorest countries. To address concerns over endogenous local ethnic composition, and in an advance over most existing work, we use an instrumental variables strategy relying on historical ethnic diversity data from the 1963 Sierra Leone Census. We find that local ethnic diversity is not associated with worse local public goods provision across a variety of outcomes, regression specifications, and diversity measures, and that these "zeros" are precisely estimated. We investigate the role that two leading mechanisms proposed in the literature - enforcement of collective action by strong local government authorities, and the existence of a common national identity and language - in generating these perhaps surprising findings.

JEL-codes: H41 O12 O55 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-afr, nep-dev, nep-pbe and nep-soc
Note: PE POL
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (23)

Published as “Collective Action in Diverse Sierra Leone Communities” (co - authors Rachel Glennerster, Alexander Rothenberg), Economic Journal , 2013, 123(568), 285 - 316.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w16196.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Collective Action in Diverse Sierra Leone Communities (2013)
Working Paper: Collective Action in Diverse Sierra Leone Communities (2010)
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:nbr:nberwo:16196

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w16196

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().