I've just had the good fortune to discover this 2002 Harvard Institute
of Economic Research paper, written by (amongst others) William
Easterly of "Africa's Growth Tragedy" fame. What I particularly like
about the new and more comprehensive data provided by this paper is
that it does an even better job of capturing the amount of diversity in
a given society, going beyond linguistic diversity to consider other
markers of differentiation like race/ethnicity and religion.
We provide new measures of ethnic, linguistic and
religious fractionalization for about 190 countries. These measures are
more comprehensive than those previously used in the economics
literature and we compare our new variables with those previously used.
We also revisit the question of the e¤ects of ethnic, linguistic and
religious fractionalization on quality of institutions and growth. We
partly confirm and partly modify previous results. The patterns of
cross-correlations between potential explanatory variables and their
different degree of endogeneity makes it hard to make unqualified
statements about competing explanations for economic growth and the
quality of government.
The mark of a good paper like
this one (unlike the sort of junk turned out by race cranks), is that
the authors go out of their way to avoid making exaggerated claims
about the scope and implications of their work. Nevertheless, one thing
is clear from the data provided: the link between heterogeneity and
poor growth is, if anything, stronger than was implied by Easterly and Levine's 1997 paper.
By
the way, I couldn't resist pointing out the following information, for
those who've ever doubted that Nigeria is a far more diverse place than
India, in spite of the fact that the latter country has 8 times as many
inhabitants as the former. For ethnic, linguistic and religious
diversity, the numbers for India were 0.4182, 0.8069 and 0.3260
respectively (with a higher number meaning greater heterogeneity). For
Nigeria, the corresponding numbers were 0.8505, 0.8316 and 0.7421,
higher in all categories, but tremendously so for both the ethnic and religious measures. Looking over the data, not a single country on earth matches Nigeria for heterogeneity - not even Indonesia or Papua New Guinea!
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