Marta Reynal-Querol

Ethnic Polarization, Potential Conflict, and Civil Wars

This paper analyzes the relationship between ethnic fractionalization, polarization, and conflict. In recent years many authors have found empirical evidence that ethnic fractionalization has a negative effect on growth. One mechanism that can explain this nexus is the effect of ethnic heterogeneity on rent-seeking activities and the increase in potential conflict, which is negative for investment. However the empirical evidence supporting the effect of ethnic fractionalization on the incidence of civil conflicts is very weak. Although ethnic fractionalization may be important for growth, we argue that the channel is not through an increase in potential ethnic conflict. We discuss the appropriateness of indices of polarization to capture conflictive dimensions. We develop a new measure of ethnic heterogeneity that satisfies the basic properties associated with the concept of polarization. The empirical section shows that this index of ethnic polarization is a significant variable in the explanation of the incidence of civil wars. This result is robust to the presence of other indicators of ethnic heterogeneity, other sources of data for the construction of the index, and other data structures.

Ethnicity, Political Systems, and Civil Wars

The effect of ethnic division on civil war and the role of political systems in preventing these conflicts are analyzed, using the importance of religious polarization and animist diversity to explain the incidence of ethnic civil war. Findings show that religious differences are a social cleavage more important than linguistic differences in the development of civil war, and being a consociational democracy significantly reduces the incidence of ethnic civil war.

Do Educated Leaders Matter

This article uses data on more than 1,000 political leaders between 1875 and 2004 to investigate whether having a more educated leader affects the rate of economic growth. We use an expanded set of random leadership transitions because of natural death or terminal illness to show, following an earlier paper by Jones and Olken (2005), that leaders matter for growth. We then provide evidence supporting the view that heterogeneity among leaders’ educational attainment is important with growth being higher by having leaders who are more highly educated.

Do Democracies Select More Educated Leaders

This paper uses a unique data set on over 1,400 world leaders between 1848 and 2004 to investigate differences in educational qualifications between leaders who are selected in democracies and autocracies. After including country and year fixed effects, we find that democracies are around 20% more likely to select highly educated leaders. This finding is robust to a wide range of specifications, choices of subsamples, controls, and ways of measuring education and democracy.

Does Foreign Aid Help

Recently, Sachs et al. (2004) have argued in favor of a massive increase in foreign aid to Africa in order to escape from a poverty trap. They propose to increase the capital stock in one step, through a large, well-targeted infusion of foreign assistance. In this article we show that foreign aid has a negative impact on the democratic stance of developing countries, and on economic growth by reducing investment and increasing government consumption. Therefore, our empirical findings do not support the Sachs proposal.

Religious polarization and economic development

Abstract This paper analyzes the effect of religious diversity on economic development. We argue that the religious polarization index is more appropriate to measure the effect of potential conflict on economic development than the traditional fragmentation index. The empirical exercises support this view.

The Legacy of Historical Conflict Evidence from Africa

This article exploits variation between and within countries to examine the legacy of recorded conflicts in Africa in the precolonial period between 1400 and 1700. There are three main findings. First, we show that historical conflict is correlated with a greater prevalence of postcolonial conflict. Second, historical conflict is correlated with lower levels of trust, a stronger sense of ethnic identity, and a weaker sense of national identity across countries. Third, historical conflict is negatively correlated with subsequent patterns of development looking at the pattern across grid cells within countries.

Why ethnic fractionalization? Polarization, ethnic conflict and growth

This paper ia an attempt to clarify the relationship between fractionalization, polarization and conflict. The literature on the measurement of ethnic diversity has taken as given that the proper measure for heterogeneity can be calculated by using the fractionalization index. This index is widely used in industrial economics and, for empirical purposes, the ethnolinguistic fragmentation is ready available for regression exercises. Nevertheless the adequacy of a synthetic index of hetergeneity depends on the intrinsic characteristics of the heterogeneous dimension to be measured. In the case of ethnic diversity there is a very strong conflictive dimension. For this reason we argue that the measure of heterogeneity should be one of the class of polarization measures. In fact the intuition of the relationship between conflict and fractionalization do not hold for more than two groups. In contrast with the usual problem of polarization indices, which are of difficult empirical implementation without making some arbitrary choice of parameters, we show that the RQ index, proposed by Reynal-Querol (2002), is the only discrete polarization measure that satisfies the basic properties of polarization. Additionally we present a derivation of the RQ index from a simple rent seeking model. In the empirical section we show that while ethnic polarization has a positive effect on civil wars and, indirectly on growth, this effect is not present when we use ethnic fractionalization.

Political systems, stability and civil wars

In this paper we analyze theoretically and empirically the stability of the different political systems; that is, their ability to prevent conflict. According to our model, the proportional system has a lower probability of group rebellion than the majoritarian system. In the empirical part we test the role of political systems in preventing civil wars. We show that democracy by itself does not play an important explanatory role, while the specific type of political system-majoritarian, presidential and proportional-does. The rationale of this result is that different political systems entail different opportunity costs of rebellion.

Poverty and Civil War: Revisiting the Evidence

Previous research has interpreted the correlation between per capita income and civil war as evidence that poverty is a main determinant of conflict. In this paper, we find that the relationship between poverty and civil war is spurious and is accounted for by historical phenomena that jointly determine income evolution and conflict. In particular, the statistical association between poverty and civil wars disappears once we include country fixed effects. Also, using crosssection data for 1960 to 2000, we find that once historical variables like European settler mortality rates and the population density in 1500 are included in civil war regressions, poverty does not have an effect on civil wars. These results are confirmed using longer time series from 1825 to 2000.