Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/170982 
Year of Publication: 
2017
Series/Report no.: 
IZA Discussion Papers No. 10998
Publisher: 
Institute of Labor Economics (IZA), Bonn
Abstract: 
We model political contestation over school language policy, within linguistic communities where weak property rights protection leads to high decentralized expropriation. We show that improvements in governance institutions that facilitate property rights protection might exacerbate such language conflicts, even as they reduce the chances of persisting with educational indigenization, while, paradoxically, increasing the net social benefit from doing so. Our findings offer explanations of why languages and cultures of the colonizers continue to play a dominant role in the educational systems of most post-colonial developing societies, and why early post-independence attempts at cultural-linguistic indigenization were either reversed or slowed down subsequently. The main policy implication of our analysis relates to the connection it establishes between property rights protection and the welfare consequences of educational indigenization: such indigenization may improve social welfare when weak institutions lead to weak property rights protection, but reduce it otherwise.
Subjects: 
production and expropriation
linguistic communities
language policy
language conflict
linguistic autarchy
linguistic globalization
property rights
JEL: 
D72
D74
O20
Z18
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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