Ethnic Diversity and the Efficiency of Public Spending in Developing Countries

Thierry Yogo ()

No 201513, Working Papers from CERDI

Abstract: This paper examines the effect of ethnic diversity on the efficiency of public spending in a set of developing countries. For this purpose, we use Data Envelopment Analysis to assess the efficiency of public spending in the sectors of health, education and infrastructure in 77 developing countries over the period 1996-2012. Further, we investigate the effect of ethnic diversity on the cross country variation in efficiency. Two main findings emerge. First, barely 12% of the sample of countries under study makes an efficient use of public expenditure. Second, no matters the level of aggregation, ethnic polarization is positively associated with higher efficiency. In contrast, ethnic fractionalization does have a negative or at the best no effect on efficiency, especially at the finest level of disaggregation.

Keywords: Ethnic diversity; Public spending efficiency; Developing countries (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H5 O11 O23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 33
Date: 2015-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eff, nep-gro and nep-mig
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://publi.cerdi.org/ed/2015/2015.13.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://publi.cerdi.org/ed/2015/2015.13.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://publi.cerdi.org/ed/2015/2015.13.pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Ethnic Diversity and the Efficiency of Public Spending in Developing Countries (2015)
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:cdi:wpaper:1692

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from CERDI Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Vincent Mazenod ().