Africa ’ s Growth Tragedy , 20 Years On

In their influential analysis of the determinants of growth in Sub-Saharan Africa, Easterly and Levine (1997) singled out the effect of ethnic divisions, revealing a “diversity burden”. Twenty years later, we here propose to revisit this diversity burden in the light of the substantial progress that has been made in data availability, econometric analysis and the understanding of the channels via which ethnic fractionalization may affect public-good provision. We use a much richer and larger dataset, instrumental-variable (rather than OLS) estimation to avoid potential biases in coefficient estimation, and test different assumptions regarding the channels via which ethnic diversity may influence public-good provision. We here instrument current ethnic diversity with a pre-colonial measure of the fractionalization index. We confirm the “diversity burden” hypothesis for eight out of the ten public goods considered, finding a substantial causal negative impact of ethnic diversity on public-good provision. However, the size of this effect varies greatly from *Ecole polytechnique gwen-jiro.clochard@polytechnique.edu. †Ecole polytechnique and CNRS guillaume.hollard@polytechnique.edu.