Alex Sinks
Faculty Sponsor: Dr. Mindy Adnot
Since the year 1900, the human population has grown from 1.65 billion to over 7 billion people today (Roser et al.). This huge growth in population has spurred development across the globe, leading to new interactions among diverse groups of people, as many have had to work together building nation states. It is important to understand trends across the globe related to developmental indicators, such as GDP, measures of inequality (Gini), and education, and how they relate to the diversity of an area. Data on ethnic fractionalization across the globe were gathered from UCLA and development indicators were taken from the World Bank. State level data were collected from the US census, ACS and Bureau of Economic Analysis. The data showed that ethnically homogenous countries tend to have higher GDPs, less inequality, higher government expenditure, and have a more educated population. However, ethnically diverse countries tend to spend a larger portion of their government spending on education. In the US, some similar trends are observed, but most are not statistically significant. There is no significant trend in percentage of bachelor’s degrees and education expenditure based upon ethnic diversity in the US. One significant trend on the state level is that inequality actually decreases with increasing diversity in the US. In the future, it would be interesting to look at why ethnic diversity seems play a negative role globally, but not on the national level for the US.
*Roser, Max, and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina. “World Population Growth.” Our World in Data, 9 May 2013, ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth