SGER: Ethnic Diversity, Social Capital, and Public Goods in East Africa

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This exploratory research attempts to make at least three contributions to the literature on the political economy of development, using original data collection, microeconometric analysis, and formal theory. First, the research estimates the impact of ethnic diversity on local public goods provision in two countries, Kenya and Tanzania. Data is being collected on local public goods, including school funding, maintenance of wells, and community participation in village meetings. The resulting dataset provides information on the impact of ethnic divisions on public good provision across a variety of settings and outcomes. Preliminary empirical results indicate that higher local ethnic diversity is associated with sharply lower local funding and worse facilities across ninety rural Kenyan primary schools. The drop in funding associated with the change from complete ethnic homogeneity to median school ethnic diversity is approximately 25 percent of average local school funding, and this relationship is robust to the inclusion of geographic, socioeconomic, demographic and teacher quality controls. Ethnically diverse areas also have lower community participation in school committee meetings, as well as substantially worse water well maintenance in rural western Kenya.Second, the research examines how central government policies toward ethnicity affect inter-ethnic relations and public goods provision, by comparing outcomes across two nearby rural districts: one in western Kenya and one in western Tanzania. Despite their shared geography, history, and colonial legacy, central governments in Kenya and Tanzania have followed radically different ethnic policies since independence.Finally, the research explores the impact of a recent local government decentralization reform in Tanzania - which was gradually phased-in across villages - on local public good outcomes. The unique dataset collected in this project allows the author to test the hypothesis that decentralization reforms improve public good outcomes, and to explore whether such reforms are less effective in ethnically diverse areas due to local collective action failures. Understanding the impacts of decentralization in diverse communities has important policy implications given the current movement toward decentralization in many African and other less developed countries.The field data collection in Tanzania is being conducted in collaboration with a capable local non-governmental organization that has a well-trained research field staff and data entry group. The author has been involved in field data collection projects in East Africa since 1995.