Global Connectivity and Ethnic Fractionalization: New Frontiers of Global Trade Agenda

International trade is an exchange that involves goods and services between countries or international territories, and it signifies a significant share of gross domestic product. Global trading provides opportunities for the country to show its products and services through imports and exports. While this international event gives rise to a world economy, global connectivity and ethnic heterogeneity play a significant role. This paper aims to determine whether the ruggedness of a country supports international trade and global connectivity and whether the ruggedness of ethnic heterogeneity supports global trading. This paper uses the non-experimental quantitative inferential design utilizing Fractal Analysis to determine the self-similarity of countries engaging in international trade in terms of their global connectivity index and ethnic fractionalization. The International Trade data provided by the World Integrated Trade Solutions and the Global Connectivity Index (GCI) data through Huawei Technologies are plotted in a histogram through Minitab Software to determine the fractality and further apply exponential logarithm. Study shows that global connectivity and ethnic fractionalization induce the fractal characteristics of the countries’ international trade ruggedness. Specific to the behavior is that countries with very high international trade also behave similarly with high global connectivity and very low ethnicity fractionalization. As countries sustain a progressive economic stance, their societies maintain very few ethnic groups to promote social cohesion, much less conflict created by many ethnic groups that vary in their concerns. This paper further explains that only countries with digital economic competitiveness and cultural homogeneity survive robust international trade.

New evidence on the link between ethnic fractionalization and economic freedom

Among the determinants of economic freedom, the presence of different ethnic groups within a country has sometimes been explored by the empirical literature, without conclusive evidence on the sign of the relation, its drivers, and the conditions under which it holds. This paper offers new evidence by empirically modelling how ethnic fragmentation is related to economic freedom, as measured by the Economic Freedom Index and by each of its numerous areas, components and sub-components. The results provide insights on the components driving the effect and, interestingly, detect notable differences between developed and developing countries.

Bringing Politics Back In

Why are some states able to provide public goods and promote broad-based development whereas other states do not have the capacity to do any of these things? In search for an answer to this question, the past few decades have witnessed a radical increase in studies emphasizing a presumed negative role of ethnic fractionalization. Having been referred to as “one of the most powerful hypotheses in political economy,” the negative impact of ethnic fractionalization is now even so widely accepted that it has become a “standard” control in regressions explaining variation in political, social, and economic development. This chapter introduces, revisits, and confronts this so-called “diversity debit hypothesis,” focusing on the role of the Quality of Government. In particular, the chapter emphasizes the need to endogenize the relationship between ethnic fractionalization and public goods provision in a way that brings the state up front of the analysis as a social force in its own right, with the power to shape notions of “us” and “them” and, thus, development outcomes.

Tribalism in Tribal Countries:How Does It Cause Corruption?

This study examines the relationship between tribal factors of ethnic fractionalization, group grievance, gender inequality, indigenous population, and the country’s level of corruption. This study also explains how tribalism causes corruption in 132 countries worldwide.

Ethnic Fractionalization, Corruption, and Trust in the Courts

Prior research has examined the effects of ethnic fractionalization on trust in political institutions. However, most of the literature focuses on a general understanding of political trust, disregarding the relationship between ethnic fractionalization and individual trust in the legal system. I argue that high levels of ethnic fractionalization decrease trust in the courts. To provide empirical support for my theory, I use individual-level survey data from 32 African and Latin American countries from 2013 and I produce two findings. First, using multiple OLS fixed effects regression analysis, I find that ethnic fractionalization decreases trust in the courts. Second, using mediation analysis, I find that ethnic fractionalization indirectly decreases trust in the courts through the mediation effect of corruption. Consequently, ethnic fractionalization is essential to understanding trust in the courts and democratic institutions in general.

Under What Conditions Is Recognition Adopted?

This chapter tests a theory that emphasizes ethnic power configurations to explain the adoption or non-adoption of ethnic recognition in conflict-affected countries from 1990 to 2012. The analysis focuses on the adoption of ethnic recognition in constitutions or comprehensive political settlements. The main finding is that minority ethnic rule strongly predicts non-adoption. When a country is under minority rule, recognition is adopted only 24 percent of the time, as compared to plurality rule, under which recognition is adopted 60 percent of the time. This relationship is robust to controlling for a large number of potential confounding factors related to both domestic and international conditions. The relationship is strongest in countries where ethnic fractionalization is low, in which case minority groups differ most in their demographic share from plurality groups. The findings support the idea that ethnic power configurations are crucial for understanding the adoption of ethnic recognition.

Ecological Performance: Ethnic Fragmentation versus Governance Quality and Sustainable Development

The article is devoted to the consideration of the ethical and ecological aspect of the framework conditions for the welfare state formation. The hypothesis of the negative influence of high ethnic fractionalization on the ecological situation in a country that in the classical welfare states is offset by the high efficiency of government through the initiation of the function of balancing the interests of ethnic groups in the transmission buffer mechanism is tested in the paper. The study used correlation and regression analysis tools using the application statistical software package STATISTICA. The hypothesis of an inverse relationship between the degree of heterogeneous society and the ecological quality is empirically substantiated. It is proved that the quality of governance can weaken the inverse relationship between ethnic fractionalization and the ecological situation in the country. In the welfare states, the neutralization factor of ethnic fractionalization by the quality of governance institutions is traced, which testifies to the existence of an institutional transmission buffer mechanism in the relationship between the structure of society and the offer of environmental goods.