Ethnic and Cultural Diversity by Country*

For their empirical evaluation, several active research programs in economics and political science require data on ethnic groups across countries. Ethnic group, however, is a slippery concept. After addressing conceptual and practical obstacles, I present a list of 822 ethnic groups in 160 countries that made up at least 1 percent of the country population in the early 1990s. I compare a measure of ethnic fractionalization based on this list with the most commonly used measure. I also construct an index of cultural fractionalization that uses the structural distance between languages as a proxy for the cultural distance between groups in a country.