Resolving the puzzle of "reversed favoritism" in African agriculture

Lennart Kaplan

No 2300, Kiel Working Papers from Kiel Institute for the World Economy

Abstract: The political economy literature highlights the redistribution of resources to political support groups - often along regional or ethnic lines - as an axiom of political systems. In contrast to this dominant pattern, Kasara (2007) documents a puzzling result of discriminatory rent extraction by political leaders from farmers in their ethnic home region. Linking a new database on the ethnic and regional affiliation of political leaders to fine-grained survey data, I disentangle ethnic and regional affiliations and show that their intersection explains the phenomenon which I will label in the following "reversed favoritism." More specifically, I provide evidence that agricultural price hikes indeed do not reduce poverty among co-ethnic farmers in the leader's birth region. My results indicate that leaders seem to act politically rational as they only apply this treatment in regions where they enjoy high trust. I show in an exploratory analysis that the counter-intuitive support of discriminatory policies can be explained by transfers in other areas, namely development aid.

Keywords: Political Economy; Favoritism; Ethnicity; African Agriculture; Development Aid (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-dev and nep-pol
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:ifwkwp:328236

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