Do racist attitudes and behaviors impede economic growth? Cross-national and regional evidence

Chandan Kumar Jha (), Swarup Joshi () and Sujana Kabiraj ()
Additional contact information
Chandan Kumar Jha: Le Moyne College
Swarup Joshi: Loyola Marymount University
Sujana Kabiraj: University of Wisconsin - Stevens Point

Public Choice, 2025, vol. 204, issue 3, No 5, 355-379

Abstract: Abstract This paper investigates the effects of racist behaviors and attitudes on economic growth. Using survey responses from the World Values Survey (WVS), we create an indicator of racist behaviors and find this indicator to be significantly and negatively associated with economic growth across countries. The association is robust to the inclusion of several geographic, institutional, and economic controls. Next, we create an indicator of racist attitudes using responses from the European Values Survey at the regional level. We find that racist attitudes are negatively associated with growth across subnational regions even after controlling for country fixed effects to eliminate concerns that the association is driven by the omission of country-specific fixed factors. We posit that lack of trust is driving the association between racist behaviors and economic growth. In support of our mechanism, in an individual-level analysis using the WVS data, we show that respondents who have witnessed racist behaviors in their neighborhood are less likely to agree with the statement that “most people can be trusted.”

Keywords: Racist attitudes; Racist behaviors; Economic growth; Trust (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J15 O1 O47 O57 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11127-025-01263-8 Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
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:kap:pubcho:v:204:y:2025:i:3:d:10.1007_s11127-025-01263-8

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... ce/journal/11127/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s11127-025-01263-8

Access Statistics for this article

Public Choice is currently edited by WIlliam F. Shughart II

More articles in Public Choice from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().