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

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. * Bar Ilan University, Department of Economics, Ramat Gan 52900, Israel. E-mail: [email protected]. George Mason University, 4400 University Drive, MSN 1D3, Fairfax, VA 22030. E-mail: [email protected]. We are grateful to the APSR editors, the anonymous referees, Alberto Alesina, Filipe Campante, Roger Congleton, Daniel Posner, William Easterly, James Fearon, Mark Gradstein, Thomas Stratmann, Romain Wacziarg and Katia Zhuravskaya for very helpful comments. We also received useful comments from seminar participants at Harvard University, Hebrew University, New Economic School, and Stockholm University, as well as from conference participants at ASREC, European Economic Association, ISNIE, Israeli Economic Association, NBER Summer Institute Political Economy Workshop, Public Choice Society and Working Group in African Political Economy. Raphaël Franck gratefully acknowledges financial support of the Adar Foundation of the Economics Department at Bar Ilan University. Ilia Rainer gratefully acknowledges financial support of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.