Ethnolinguistic diversity and urban agglomeration
Ulrich J. Eberle, J. Vernon Henderson, Dominic Rohner and Kurt Schmidheiny
This article shows that higher ethnolinguistic diversity is associated with a greater risk of social tensions and conflict, which, in turn, is a dispersion force lowering urbanization and the incentives to move to big cities. We construct a worldwide dataset at a fine-grained level on urban settlement patterns and ethnolinguistic population composition. For 3,540 provinces of 170 countries, we find that increased ethnolinguistic fractionalization and polarization are associated with lower urbanization and an increased role for secondary cities relative to the primate city of a province. These striking associations are quantitatively important and robust to various changes in variables and specifications. We find that democratic institutions affect the impact of ethnolinguistic diversity on urbanization patterns. ? 2020 National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.
14 July 2020
PNAS 117(28) , pp.16250-16257, 2020
https://www.pnas.org/content/117/28/16250
This Journal article is published under the centre's Urban programme.