Language, livelihoods and well-being in multilingual countries: Reaching the research-frontier with secondary data for Ghana

We examine how language skills affect earnings, health and other life-outcomes in Ghana, a
multilingual country in Sub-Saharan Africa. This is important as supporting multiple languages in
education, labour markets and public services is expensive, but minority groups not achieving their full
potential can be even more costly. Due to underlying differences in life chances, linguistic groups are
not directly comparable. We disentangle this in collaboration with local experts using statistical
decomposition methods that allow us to approximate like-for-like comparison.