Linguistic Fractionalization and Health Information in Sub-Saharan Africa

This paper explores the relationship between linguistic diversity and the stock of health information in society. Information is measured using individual-level knowledge about the oral rehydration product for treating children with diarrhea. Exploiting an individual woman-level dataset from the Dem...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Gomes, Joseph Flavian
Published: Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank 2021
Subjects:
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/10986/36119
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Summary:This paper explores the relationship between linguistic diversity and the stock of health information in society. Information is measured using individual-level knowledge about the oral rehydration product for treating children with diarrhea. Exploiting an individual woman-level dataset from the Demographic and Health Surveys for 14 sub-Saharan African countries combined with a novel high-resolution dataset on the spatial distribution of linguistic groups at a 1 km × 1 km level, this study shows that linguistic diversity has an inverted U-shaped relationship with the stock of information in society.