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Does the Leader’s Ethnicity Matter? Ethnic Favoritism, Education and Health in Sub-Saharan Africa

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  • Raphaёl Franck

    () (Bar-Ilan University)

  • Ilia Rainer

Abstract

In this paper we reassess the role of ethnic favoritism in Sub-Saharan Africa. Using data from 18 African countries, we study how primary education and infant mortality of ethnic groups were affected by changes in the ethnicity of the countries’ leaders during the last fifty years. Our results indicate that the effects of ethnic favoritism are large and widespread, thus providing support for ethnicity-based explanations of Africa’s underdevelopment. We also conduct a crosscountry analysis of ethnic favoritism in Africa. We find that ethnic favoritism is less prevalent in countries with one dominant religion. In addition, our evidence suggests that stronger fiscal capacity may have enabled African leaders to provide more ethnic favors in education but not in infant mortality. Finally, political factors, linguistic differences and patterns of ethnic segregation are found to be poor predictors of ethnic favoritism.

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Bibliographic Info

Paper provided by Department of Economics, Bar-Ilan University in its series Working Papers with number 2012-06.

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Length: 57 pages
Date of creation: Mar 2012
Date of revision:
Handle: RePEc:biu:wpaper:2012-06

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Cited by:
  1. Alberto F. Alesina & Stelios Michalopoulos & Elias Papaioannou, 2012. "Ethnic Inequality," NBER Working Papers 18512, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  2. Stelios Michalopoulos & Elias Papaioannou, 2011. "Divide and Rule or the Rule of the Divided? Evidence from Africa," Economics Working Papers 0099, Institute for Advanced Study, School of Social Science.
  3. Bramoullé, Y. & Goyal, S., 2009. "Favoritism," Cambridge Working Papers in Economics 0942, Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge.
  4. Cristina Bodea & Adrienne LeBas, 2013. "The Origins of Social Contracts: Attitudes toward Taxation in Urban Nigeria," Economics Series Working Papers WPS/2013-02, University of Oxford, Department of Economics.
  5. Roland Hodler, 2013. "The Political Economics of the Arab Spring," OxCarre Working Papers 101, Oxford Centre for the Analysis of Resource Rich Economies, University of Oxford.
  6. Cristina Bodea & Adrienne LeBas, 2013. "The Origins of Social Contracts: Attitudes toward Taxation in Urban Nigeria," CSAE Working Paper Series 2013-02, Centre for the Study of African Economies, University of Oxford.

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