List of countries by ethnic and cultural diversity level

Methodology

The lists are commonly used in economics literature to compare the levels of ethnic, cultural, linguistic and religious fractionalization in different countries.

Fractionalization is the probability that two individuals drawn randomly from the country's groups are not from the same group (ethnic, religious, or whatever the criterion is). In Fearon's analysis, only groups containing over one percent of the country's population were considered. This limit made Papua New Guinea an outlier; as none of its thousands of groups included more than one percent of the population, it was considered to have zero groups and thus have a perfect fractionalization score of 1.

The two lists have been described by Alesina and La Ferrara as follows: :Fearon and Alesina et al. have compiled various measures of ethnic heterogeneity which try to tackle the fact that the difference amongst groups manifests itself in different ways in different places. The two classifications are constructed differently. Alesina et al. do not take a stand on what ethnicity (or language or religion) are more salient than others and adopt the country breakdown suggested by original sources, mainly the Encyclopædia Britannica. Fearon instead is trying to construct the 'right list' of ethnic groups which 'depends on what people in the country identify as the most socially relevant ethnic groupings'. This approach has the advantage of being closer to what the theory would want and the disadvantage of having to make judgement calls (or adopt others' judgement calls) about what is the 'right list'.

List based on Fearon's analysis

In the Fearon list, cultural fractionalization is approximated by a measure of similarity between languages, varying from 1 = the population speaks two or more unrelated languages to 0 = the entire population speaks the same language. This index of cultural diversity is biased towards linguistic variations as opposed to genetic diversity and other variations. It should also be noted that the date of collection for data regarding ethnicity varies drastically between countries from 1981 to 2001 while data for linguistic and religious fractionalisation was collected in 2001.

References

References

1. A. Alesina, E. La Ferrara. (2005). "Ethnic Diversity and Economic Performance". Journal of Economic Literature.
2. Natalka Patsiurko, John L. Campbell and John A. Hall. (2012). "Measuring cultural diversity: ethnic, linguistic and religious fractionalization in the OECD". Ethnic and Racial Studies.
3. James Fearon. (2003). "Ethnic and Cultural Diversity by Country". Journal of Economic Growth.
4. Alberto Alesina. (2003). "Fractionalization". Journal of Economic Growth.