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Hello! Namaste? Within-country linguistic diversity and infrastructure projects in emerging markets

2021; Elsevier BV; Volume: 130; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/j.jbusres.2021.02.063

1873-7978

Alfredo Jiménez, Seçil Bayraktar,

Public Procurement and Policy

This paper investigates the impact of within-country linguistic diversity on the performance of private participation infrastructure projects. In view of the relevance of language heterogeneity in Asia, we first test a sample of 2921 projects in 7 countries in this region from 1990 to 2013. The findings indicate that higher linguistic diversity is associated with a lower likelihood of project success, and that this negative effect is weakened when the project is greenfield. In contrast, we find no significant effect for projects that include government ownership. Subsequently, we explore the differences between domestic versus foreign projects, as well as a larger sample of countries worldwide. The study contributes to the current debate in the literature by pointing out that within-country linguistic diversity can be a threat to private participation projects, offering useful managerial recommendations on how to reduce this threat.