Ethno-linguistic diversity and urban agglomeration

Eberle, Ulrich J., Henderson, J. Vernon ORCID: 0000-0002-0985-9415, Rohner, Dominic and Schmidheiny, Kurt (2020) Ethno-linguistic diversity and urban agglomeration. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 117 (28). 16250 - 16257. ISSN 1091-6490

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Abstract

This article shows that higher ethno-linguistic 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 novel worldwide data set at a fine-grained level on urban settlement patterns and ethno-linguistic population composition. For 3,540 provinces of 170 countries, we find that increased ethno-linguistic 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 ethno-linguistic diversity on urbanization patterns.

Item Type:	Article
Official URL:	https://www.pnas.org/
Additional Information:	© 2020 The Authors
Divisions:	Centre for Economic Performance Geography & Environment
Subjects:	P Language and Literature H Social Sciences > HN Social history and conditions. Social problems. Social reform G Geography. Anthropology. Recreation > GF Human ecology. Anthropogeography
Date Deposited:	21 May 2020 09:03
Last Modified:	12 Dec 2024 02:10
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/104513

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