Ethnic Heterogeneity, Voting Partecipation and Local Economic Growth. The Case of Belgium

Alessandro Innocenti (), Francesca Lorini and Chiara Rapallini

Working Papers - Economics from Universita' degli Studi di Firenze, Dipartimento di Scienze per l'Economia e l'Impresa

Abstract: The paper analyzes the case of Belgium to provide insight into the relationships among ethnic heterogeneity, voting participation and local economic growth. We find that heterogeneity, and external and internal mobility reduce immigrants’ voting participation, while we do not find support for the hypothesis that voting participation is related to local economic growth, with the exception of Flanders, which is the most ethnically homogeneous region of Belgium. This finding is interpreted as showing that an increase in ethnic heterogeneity prevails over other factors in determining local economic performance via a decline in social capital.

Keywords: ethnic heterogeneity; voting; political participation; local economic growth; Tiebout model. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 H4 H7 N4 R1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 25 pages
Date: 2014
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-gro, nep-pol, nep-soc and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.disei.unifi.it/upload/sub/pubblicazioni/repec/pdf/wp03_2014.pdf (application/pdf)

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:frz:wpaper:wp2014_03.rdf

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers - Economics from Universita' degli Studi di Firenze, Dipartimento di Scienze per l'Economia e l'Impresa Via delle Pandette 9 50127 - Firenze - Italy. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Giorgio Ricchiuti ().