IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/ebl/ecbull/eb-08aa0016.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Autocratic rule in ethnically-diverse societies

Author

Listed:
  • J. Atsu Amegashie

    (University of Guelph)

Abstract

An autocrat who is politically insecure may not invest in income-enhancing goods like education, roads, the rule of law, etc. The novelty of this paper is to argue that ethnic diversity and discrimination exacerbate an autocrat's fear of the negative effect of high income or income-enhancing investments like public education on his political survival. I show that in such ethnically-diverse societies, kleptocrats may be better off with a bigger share of a smaller national income than they are with a smaller share of a bigger national income. I discuss applications and limitations of my results.

Suggested Citation

  • J. Atsu Amegashie, 2008. "Autocratic rule in ethnically-diverse societies," Economics Bulletin, AccessEcon, vol. 28(10), pages 1.
    • Handle: RePEc:ebl:ecbull:eb-08aa0016
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.accessecon.com/pubs/EB/2008/Volume28/EB-08AA0016A.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Pierre Pecher, 2018. "Ethnic divisions and the effect of appropriative competition intensity on economic performance," Economics of Governance, Springer, vol. 19(2), pages 165-193, May.
    2. Pierre PECHER, 2013. "Ethnic conflict, power dynamics and growth," LIDAM Discussion Papers IRES 2014008, Université catholique de Louvain, Institut de Recherches Economiques et Sociales (IRES).

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • H1 - Public Economics - - Structure and Scope of Government
    • H2 - Public Economics - - Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ebl:ecbull:eb-08aa0016. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: John P. Conley (email available below). General contact details of provider: .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.