Ethnic Diversity and Economic Growth

Since Easterly and Levine published their paper: Africa’s Growth Tragedy: “Policies and Ethnic Divisions”(1996), ethnic diversity has become the focus of many economic papers, discussing its negative effects on economic performance. However, ethnic diversity is a miscellaneous term and when measured by different individuals or institutions will yield different results. In part two of this thesis I find, conducting research on ethnic, linguistic and religious diversity data from several sources, that, even though institution might argue to measure the same, their outcomes are often very different. Resulting in correlations as low 0.64, which seems remarkably low considering they aim to measure the same phenomenon. Conducting empirical research, on all 19 different diversity variables included in this thesis, shows that some ethnic fractionalization variables produce similar significant results in economic growth research. However, since the differences among the diversity variables are so large, results are always subject to doubt and are impossible to reliably quantify.