New book chapter! IBEI assistant professor Matthias vom Hau is one of the contributors to The Politics of Inclusive Development: Interrogating the Evidence, edited by Sam Hickey, Kunal Sen and Badru Bukenyu and published this month by Oxford University Press.

The book is the first major academic collection from the Effective States and Inclusive Development Research Centre (ESID). It is made up of a large number of studies that demonstrate why politics and institutions matter in development and the delivery of growth and services.

Matthias has contributed a co-authored chapter that revisits and challenges the political economy scholarship on the supposedly negative relationship between ethnic diversity and public goods provision. Together with Prerna Singh (Brown University) he develops the contours of an alternative approach that injects politics and history into the analysis of this relationship. Of particular concern for the chapter is to develop a novel set of causal mechanisms that focus on state preferences and state institutions rather than the actions by ethnic groups when tracing how ethnicity impacts on the provision of public goods and services.

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