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Does the Leader’s Ethnicity Matter?
Ethnic Favoritism, Education and Health in Sub-Saharan Africa
Raphaël Franck
*
Ilia Rainer
**
March 2012
Abstract
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 cross-
country 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: raphael.franck@biu.ac.il.
**
George Mason University, 4400 University Drive, MSN 1D3, Fairfax, VA 22030. E-mail: irainer@gmu.edu.
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.
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1. Introduction
In their pioneering paper, Easterly and Levine (1997) suggested that Sub-Saharan
Africa’s high level of ethnic diversity can explain the region’s poor economic performance. They
found that in a broad cross section of countries, ethnic diversity was correlated with bad
economic policies, slow economic growth and low levels of per capita income. Subsequent
research has confirmed these patterns, as ethnically diverse countries were found to have poor
quality of government and inadequate provision of public goods (La Porta et al. 1999, Alesina et
al. 2003). Yet, due to the well-known limitations of the cross-country studies, it remains unclear
whether the adverse effects of ethnic diversity are causal and, if so, what are the main
mechanisms through which they operate (Alesina and La Ferrara 2005).
A leading set of explanations for the poor economic performance of ethnically diverse
countries is political. It is often argued that ethnic diversity leads to costly rent-seeking by
different ethnic groups (e.g. Easterly and Levine 1997) and generates conflict over the provision
of public goods (e.g. Alesina, Baqir and Easterly 1999). These arguments imply that politically
dominant ethnic groups will use their power to provide economic benefits to their own members.
La Porta et al. (1999, p. 231) explicitly link the costs of ethnic diversity to ethnic favoritism: “In
ethnically heterogeneous societies, it has been common for the groups that come to power to
fashion government policies that expropriate…the ethnic losers…, and limit the production of
public goods to prevent those outside the ruling group from also benefiting and getting stronger”.
Easterly and Levine (1997) and Alesina et al. (2003) also use anecdotes of ethnic favoritism from
several African countries to illustrate the economic costs of ethnic diversity.
Ethnic favoritism has also been a prominent theme in formal theories of ethnic politics. In
the models of Fearon (1999) and Caselli and Coleman (2006), ethnicity is used as an exclusion
device, and the winning ethnic groups redistribute resources toward their own members.
Likewise, Padro i Miguel (2007) predicts that a change in the ethnic group in power should lead
to a change in taxation and allocation of public goods across the groups. He also argues that
ethnic favoritism is prevalent in Africa and can explain the low accountability of African
political leaders.
In contrast to the theoretical arguments that link poor economic outcomes of African
countries to ethnic favoritism, there is no systematic empirical evidence that members of African
ethnic groups actually benefit from having their leaders in power. African leaders appear to tax
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more heavily the crops grown in their own ethnic regions (Kasara 2007); and, in Guinea, the
change in the president’s ethnicity was found to have no effect on the relative levels of infant
mortality among the country’s ethnic groups (Kudamatsu 2007).
In this paper, we reassess the role of ethnic favoritism in Sub-Saharan Africa. Using the
Demographic Health Surveys (DHS), we construct time-variant ethnic-level measures of
education and health, and study how they are affected by changes in the ethnicity of top political
leaders in 18 African countries over the last fifty years. We use the difference-in-difference
methodology and estimate the average effects of ethnic favoritism in our sample of countries as
well as its effects in each individual country.
In our analysis of education, we rely on the fact that most Africans who attend primary
school do so between ages 6 and 13 (World Bank 2008). This allows us to measure the ethnic
groups’ educational achievements in different time periods using the DHS data on primary
education and literacy of people from different age cohorts. In our analysis of health, we follow
Kudamatsu (2006, 2007) and measure the past levels of infant mortality using the DHS
retrospective reports of African women regarding the death or survival of their children.
Intuitively, our difference-in-difference estimates answer two questions. First, do people
who happened to be between 6 and 13 years old during the rule of their coethnic country leader
have a higher probability of attending/completing primary school or becoming literate? Second,
do children who happened to be born when their coethnic was in power have a lower probability
of dying during the first year of their lives?
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We find that ethnic favoritism is an important determinant of education and infant
mortality in Sub-Saharan Africa. We estimate that the leaders of the 18 countries in our sample
have on average increased the primary school attendance, completion and literacy of their ethnic
groups by about 2 percentage points and reduced their infant mortality by about 0.4 percentage
points. These effects of ethnic favoritism are large relative to the average time trends in
education and infant mortality, corresponding to approximately three years of secular
improvement in these outcomes in the countries we study. They are also similar to the effects of
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We interpret the affirmative answers to these questions as evidence for causal effects of ethnic favoritism on
education and health. In Section 2.2, we discuss several mechanisms through which African leaders can improve the
education and health of their coethnics, and in Section 5 we provide empirical support for the causal interpretation of
our results.
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direct policy interventions typically found in the broader literature on education and health in
developing countries (e.g. Glewwe and Kremer 2006, Jones et al. 2003).
Our analysis of individual African countries confirms the importance of the leader’s
ethnicity. Although the effects of ethnic favoritism vary from country to country, we find that in
most countries in our sample it has a strong impact on education, infant mortality or both. Thus,
in Sub-Saharan Africa ethnic favoritism is not only important on average, but is also quite
widespread.
Overall, our findings are consistent with the theoretical arguments that link Africa’s poor
economic performance to ethnic favoritism. At the same time, they are inconsistent with the
earlier empirical work that found no evidence of ethnic favoritism in Africa. In particular, even if
African leaders impose higher taxes on their coethnics (Kasara 2007), they also provide them
with large education and health benefits in return.
We also make an attempt to address another important question: why is ethnic favoritism
more prevalent in some African countries than in others? To evaluate some of the available
theoretical arguments, we run education and infant mortality regressions in which we interact our
measure of leader’s ethnicity with the relevant country-level variables. This analysis, which
captures bivariate correlations across the 18 countries in our sample, produces several interesting
results.
First, we find mixed evidence on the role of the fiscal capacity of African governments
(Herbst 2000) in explaining the uneven spread of ethnic favoritism on the continent. In
particular, countries whose governments collect more revenues and have greater resources to
spend on the provision of public goods
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tend to have more ethnic favoritism in education, but
less ethnic favoritism in infant mortality. Second, four countries with one dominant religion
(Islam) have significantly lower levels of ethnic favoritism than the other fourteen that have
much higher degree of religious fractionalization (Alesina et al. 2003). Third, the political
variables (i.e. polity scores, experience with multi-party or single party elections and frequency
of coups) that could affect the incentives of the leaders to cater to their ethnic groups cannot
explain the cross-country differences in ethnic favoritism. Finally, countries whose ethnic groups
2
In this paper, we follow the literature (e.g. Easterly and Levine 1997, La Porta et al. 1999, Alesina et al. 2003) and
use the term “public goods” to mean services which are provided or financed by the government. Primary education
and infant health typically constitute public goods in this broad sense, although they do not fit the narrower
definition of “pure public goods”.
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speak more distant languages (Fearon 2003) or live in more segregated areas (Matuszeski and
Schneider 2006) also do not display higher levels of ethnic favoritism.
On the whole, by showing the importance of ethnic favoritism in Africa, this paper
provides evidence in support of the ethnicity-based explanations of the continent’s
underdevelopment. But the costs of African ethnic diversity may be even larger than suggested
by our analysis. First, some of the transfers that ethnic groups receive from their leaders may not
be translated into immediate gains in their education and health. Thus, until we have better data
on changes in income of different groups, we might underestimate the amount of ethnic
favoritism in Africa. Second, while we estimate the benefits to the ordinary members of ethnic
groups from having their coethnics in power, African leaders may deliver even larger favors to
ethnic elites. Such narrower elite-based ethnic favoritism can exacerbate ethnic rent-seeking and
conflict, and further hamper economic development. Finally, while we only focus on the political
role of ethnicity, African ethnic diversity may have other economic costs. For example, people
from different ethnic groups may be less productive working together (Lazear 1999,
Habyarimana et al. 2007) or may find it hard to sanction the free-riders and solve the collective
action problem in the provision of local public goods (e.g. Miguel and Gugerty 2005).
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 provides some theoretical
background for our empirical analysis. Section 3 describes our leader ethnicity data and explains
the construction of our measures of education and health. Section 4 estimates the average effects
of ethnic favoritism in our sample of 18 countries and its separate effects in each individual
country. It also presents a case study of Congo-Brazzaville that illustrates how ethnic favoritism
can operate in practice. Section 5 provides evidence in support of the causal interpretation of our
regression results. Section 6 examines why ethnic favoritism is more prevalent in some African
countries than in others. The last section concludes.
2. Theoretical background
In this section, we provide some theoretical background for our empirical analysis. First,
we describe three general models of ethnic politics and discuss their implications for ethnic
favoritism in Africa. We show that the models produce different theoretical predictions, and
argue that it is ultimately an empirical task to demonstrate the existence of ethnic favoritism in
Africa. Second, we discuss the possible mechanisms through which African leaders who pursue
