Table 6.
Ethnic Inequality and Development Conditioning on Perturbed Ethnic Homelands
| Atlas Narodov Mira (GREG)
|
Ethnologue
|
|||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| (1) | (2) | (3) | (4) | (5) | (6) | (7) | (8) | |
| Ethnic Inequality [Gini Coeff.] | −0.9510* (0.5004) | −0.9566* (0.5074) | −0.8652* (0.5174) | −0.9276** (0.4383) | −1.4389*** (0.4075) | −1.4365*** (0.4115) | −1.2413*** (0.4159) | −0.8063* (0.4166) |
| Perturbed Ethnic Inequality [Gini Coeff.] | −0.5371 (0.5258) | −0.5457 (0.5262) | −0.8223 (0.5469) | −0.2645 (0.4829) | 0.3302 (0.4640) | 0.3376 (0.4718) | 0.0259 (0.4950) | −0.1845 (0.4410) |
| Ethnic/Linguistic Fragmentation | 0.0446 (0.3521) | −0.0107 (0.3498) | 0.1614 (0.3159) | −0.0213 (0.2962) | −0.0147 (0.2962) | 0.1510 (0.2656) | ||
| Adjusted R-squared | 0.654 | 0.652 | 0.662 | 0.721 | 0.653 | 0.650 | 0.657 | 0.718 |
| Observations | 173 | 173 | 173 | 173 | 173 | 173 | 173 | 173 |
| Region Fixed Effects | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Simple Controls | No | No | Yes | Yes | No | No | Yes | Yes |
| Geographic Conrols | No | No | No | Yes | No | No | No | Yes |
The table reports cross-country OLS estimates. The dependent variable is the log of real GDP per capita in 2000. The ethnic Gini coefficients reflect inequality in lights per capita across ethnic homelands, based on the digitized version of the Atlas Narodov Mira (GREG) in columns (1)–(4) and on the Ethnologue in columns (5)–(8). The perturbed ethnic inequality measures (Gini coefficients) capture the degree of spatial inequality across Thiessen polygons in each country that use as input points the centroids of the ethnic-linguistic homelands according to the Atlas Narodov Mira (in columns (1)–(4)) and to the Ethnologue (in columns (5)–(8)). Thiessen polygons have the unique property that each polygon contains only one input point, and any location within a polygon is closer to its associated point than to a point of any other polygon. In specifications (2)–(4) and (6)–(8) we control for ethnic/linguistic fragmentation using indicators reflecting the likelihood that two randomly chosen individuals in one country will not be members of the same group (the ethnic fragmentation index in (2)–(4) comes from Alesina et al. (2003) and the linguistic fragmentation index in (6)–(8) comes from Desmet et al. (2013)). Specifications (3), (4), (7), and (8) include as controls log land area and log population in 2000 (simple set of controls). Specifications (4) and (8) include as controls an index of terrain ruggedness, the percentage of each country with fertile soil, the percentage of each country with tropical climate, average distance to nearest ice-free coast, and an index of gem-quality diamond extraction (geographic set of controls). All specifications include regional fixed effects (constants not reported). The Data Appendix gives detailed variable definitions and data sources. Robust standard errors are reported in parentheses below the estimates.
***, **, and * indicate statistical significance at the 1%, 5%, and 10% level, respectively.