Who Benefits? How Local Ethnic Demography Shapes Political Favoritism in Africa

Empirical studies show that many governments gear the provision of goods and services towards their ethnic peers. This article investigates governments’ strategies to provide ethnic favors in Africa. Recent studies of ethnic favoritism find that presidents' ethnic peers and home regions enjoy advantages, yet cannot disentangle whether goods are provided to entire regions or co-ethnic individuals. This article argues that local ethnic demography determines whether governments provide non-excludable public goods or more narrowly targeted handouts. Where government co-ethnics are in the majority, public goods benefit all locals regardless of their ethnic identity. Outside of these strongholds, incumbents pursue discriminatory strategies and only their co-ethnics gain from favoritism. Using fine-grained geographic data on ethnic demographics, the study finds support for the argument's implications in the local incidence of infant mortality. These findings have important implications for theories of distributive politics and conflict in multi-ethnic societies.

Research Perspectives

The previous chapters documented and formally analyzed a variety of channels, both old and new, through which public capital may affect growth. Various extensions, mostly technical in nature, were outlined at the end of some chapters. This chapter sets out a broader research agenda on the links among public capital, growth, and human welfare. It considers the following areas: heterogeneous infrastructure assets, the political economy of government spending allocation, excludable public goods, interactions between government debt and public capital accumulation in the presence of fiscal rules, spatial and regional dimensions of public capital, infrastructure and trade, public–private partnerships, the impact of public capital on income distribution, negative externalities associated with public capital, and empirical tests of the impact of public capital on growth.

Optimal Provision of Multiple Excludable Public Goods

This paper studies the optimal provision mechanism for multiple excludable public goods. For a class of problems with symmetric goods and binary valuations, we show that the optimal mechanism involves bundling if a regularity condition, akin to a hazard rate condition, on the distribution of valuations is satisfied. Relative to separate provision mechanisms, the optimal bundling mechanism may increase the asymptotic provision probability of socially efficient public goods from zero to one, and decreases the extent of use exclusions. If the regularity condition is violated, the optimal solution replicates the separate provision outcome for the two-good case. (JEL D82, H41)