Dynamic Ethnic Fractionalization and Economic Growth

Nauro Campos, Ahmad Saleh and Vitaliy S. Kuzeyev

No 30, Proceedings of the German Development Economics Conference, Frankfurt a.M. 2009 from Verein für Socialpolitik, Research Committee Development Economics

Abstract: In their survey of the literature on ethnic fractionalization and economic performance, Alesina and La Ferrara (JEL 2005) identify two main directions for future research. One is to improve the measurement of diversity and the other to treat diversity as an endogenous variable. This paper tries to address these two issues. We study the effects of ethnic fractionalization on economic growth using unique time-varying measures across countries, for 26 transition economies from 1989 to 2007. Our main conclusion is that we can replicate the most recent results from the literature and show that static (exogenous) diversity is not robustly related to growth. However, when we account empirically for how ethnic diversity changes over time and treat it as an endogenous variable, our estimates show that it is negatively related to growth an effect which is robust to different estimators, specifications, and fractionalization measures.

Keywords: ethnic diversity; fractionalization; polarization; growth (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H1 O11 O55 Z12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/39941/1/30_saleh.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Dynamic ethnic fractionalization and economic growth (2011)
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:zbw:gdec09:30

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Proceedings of the German Development Economics Conference, Frankfurt a.M. 2009 from Verein für Socialpolitik, Research Committee Development Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().