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.