Segregation and the Quality of Government in a Cross-Section of Countries

Alberto Alesina () and Ekaterina Zhuravskaya ()

No 14316, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This paper has three goals. The first (and perhaps the most important one) is to provide a new compilation of data on ethnic, linguistic and religious composition at the sub-national level for a large number of countries. This data set allows us to measure segregation of different ethnic, religious and linguistic groups within the same country. The second goal is to correlate measures of segregation with measures of quality of the polity and policymaking. The third is to construct an instrument that helps to overcome the endogeneity problem due to the fact that groups move within country borders, partly in response to policies. Our results suggest that more segregated countries in terms of ethnicity and language, i.e., those where groups live more spatially separately, have a substantially lower quality of government. In contrast, there is no relationship between religious segregation and the government quality.

JEL-codes: H10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mig and nep-ure
Date: 2008-09
Note: PE
View list of references

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w14316.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html.

Related works:
Working Paper: Segregation and the Quality of Government in a Cross-Section of Countries (2008)
Working Paper: Segregation and the Quality of Government in a Cross-Section of Countries (2008)
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: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:14316

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w14316
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

Access Statistics for this paper

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