 Ethnic diversity, economic performance and civil warsNo 433, Working Papers in Economics from University of Gothenburg, Department of Economics Abstract: We develop a conflict model linking dissipation to the distribution of the population over an arbitrary number of groups. We extend the pure contest version of the model by Esteban and Ray (1999) to include a mixed public-private good. We analyze how the level of dissipation changes as the population distribution and the share of publicness of the prize change. First, we find that, in case of pure private goods, the dissipation-distribution relationship resembles the fractionalization index. This may explain the sensitiveness of empirical evidence on the impact of ethnic diversity with respect to outcome (growth, incidence of civil wars) and index (fractionalization, discrete polarization). Second, we find that, in case of pure private goods, smaller groups always contribute more and so the fractionalization index under-estimates their weight. Indeed, we find that the fractionalization index under-estimates the true level of dissipation.
Keywords: ethnic diversity; public-private goods; polarization; fractionalization (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hhs:gunwpe:0433 Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Working Papers in Economics from University of Gothenburg, Department of Economics Department of Economics, School of Business, Economics and Law, University of Gothenburg, Box 640, SE 405 30 GÖTEBORG, Sweden. Contact information at EDIRC. |
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