Ethnic diversity, social sanctions, and public goods in Kenya

نویسندگان

  • Edward Miguel
  • Mary Kay Gugerty
چکیده

This paper examines ethnic diversity and local public goods in rural western Kenya. The identification strategy relies on the stable historically determined patterns of ethnic land settlement. Ethnic diversity is associated with lower primary school funding and worse school facilities, and there is suggestive evidence that it leads to poor water well maintenance. The theoretical model illustrates how inability to impose social sanctions in diverse communities leads to collective action failures, and we find that school committees in diverse areas do impose fewer sanctions on defaulting parents. We relate these results to the literature on social capital and economic development and discuss implications for decentralization in less developed countries. D 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. JEL classification: D71; H41; O12

برای دانلود متن کامل این مقاله و بیش از 32 میلیون مقاله دیگر ابتدا ثبت نام کنید

ثبت نام

اگر عضو سایت هستید لطفا وارد حساب کاربری خود شوید

منابع مشابه

Law and Finance in Historical Perspective: Politics, Bankruptcy Law, and Corporate Governance in Brazil, 18502002

Alesina, Alberto, Reza Baqir, and William Easterly. “Public Goods and Ethnic Divisions.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 114, no. 4 (1999): 1243–84. Alesina, Alberto, and Eliana La Ferrara. “Ethnic Diversity and Economic Performance.” Journal of Economic Literature 43, no. 3 (2005): 762–800. Banerjee, Abhijit, and Rohini Somanathan. “The Political Economy of Public Goods: Some Evidence from Indi...

متن کامل

TRIBE OR NATION? Nation Building and Public Goods in Kenya versus Tanzania

T design of public policies that promote interethnic cooperation remains poorly understood nearly twenty years after the appearance of Horowitz's seminal work. Recent research suggests that ethnically diverse societies are prone to corruption, political instability, poor institutional performance, and slow economic growth and that in the United States higher levels of diversity are related to l...

متن کامل

Why Does Ethnic Diversity Undermine Public Goods Provision?

Alarge and growing literature links high levels of ethnic diversity to low levels of public goods provision. Yet although the empirical connection between ethnic heterogeneity and the underprovision of public goods is widely accepted, there is little consensus on the specific mechanisms through which this relationship operates. We identify three families of mechanisms that link diversity to pub...

متن کامل

Migration Und Diversity Migration, Integration, Transnationalization Ethnic Diversity, Public Goods Provision and Social Cohesion Ethnic Diversity, Public Goods Provision and Social Cohesion Lessons from an Inconclusive Literature

Over the last two decades there has been a growing debate on the supposedly negative relation between ethnic diversity, public goods production and social cohesion. Despite the amount of evidence, existing in-depth qualitative reviews conclude that the literature is inconclusive. Advancing upon their work, I conduct a quantitative review of over 480 empirical findings from 172 studies. Rather t...

متن کامل

The Switching Pattern of Government Expenditures in Response to Sanctions in Iran

Abstract: The aim of international economic sanctions is imposing economic restrictions on target countries. In order to decrease the sanctions negative brunt on citizenry and make it ineffective, government may respond to sanctions through policies such as increasing the supply of public goods. This paper studies the regime changes of government expenditures in Iranian economy in response to e...

متن کامل

ذخیره در منابع من


  با ذخیره ی این منبع در منابع من، دسترسی به آن را برای استفاده های بعدی آسان تر کنید

برای دانلود متن کامل این مقاله و بیش از 32 میلیون مقاله دیگر ابتدا ثبت نام کنید

ثبت نام

اگر عضو سایت هستید لطفا وارد حساب کاربری خود شوید

عنوان ژورنال:

دوره   شماره 

صفحات  -

تاریخ انتشار 2005