Ethnic Diversity and Inequality in Sub-Saharan Africa: Do Institutions Reduce the Noise?

Kazeem Ajide (), Olorunfemi Alimi and Simplice Asongu

Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, 2019, vol. 145, issue 3, No 16, 1033-1062

Abstract: Abstract Studies on the causes of income differences between the rich and the poor have received an extensive attention in the inequality empirics. While ethnic diversity has also been identified as one of the fundamental causes of income inequality, the role of institutions as a mediating factor in the ethnicity-inequality nexus has not received the scholarly attention it deserves. To this end, this study complements the existing literature by investigating the extent to which institutional framework corrects the noisy influence originating from the nexus between “ethnic diversity” and inequality in 26 sub-Saharan African countries for the period 1996–2015. The empirical evidence is based on pooled OLS, fixed effects and system GMM estimators. The main findings reveal that the mediating influences of institutional settings are defective, thus making it extremely difficult to modulate the noisy impacts of ethno-linguistic and religious heterogeneity on inequality. In addition, the negative influences orchestrated by ethno-linguistic and religious diversities on inequality fail to attenuate the impact of income disparity even when interacted with institutions. On the policy front, institutional reforms tailored toward economic, political and institutional governances should be targeted.

Keywords: Linguistic; Religious; Ethnicity; Inequality; Institutions; Kuznets curve (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C23 D02 D63 E02 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11205-019-02122-y Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
Working Paper: Ethnic Diversity and Inequality in sub-Saharan Africa: Do Institutions Reduce the Noise? (2019)
Working Paper: Ethnic Diversity and Inequality in sub-Saharan Africa: Do Institutions Reduce the Noise? (2019)
Working Paper: Ethnic Diversity and Inequality in sub-Saharan Africa: Do Institutions Reduce the Noise? (2019)
Working Paper: Ethnic Diversity and Inequality in sub-Saharan Africa: Do Institutions Reduce the Noise? (2019)
Working Paper: Ethnic Diversity and Inequality in sub-Saharan Africa: Do Institutions Reduce the Noise? (2019)
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:spr:soinre:v:145:y:2019:i:3:d:10.1007_s11205-019-02122-y

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11135

DOI: 10.1007/s11205-019-02122-y

Access Statistics for this article

Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement is currently edited by Filomena Maggino

More articles in Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().