This article contributes to the literature on the nexus between climate change and violence by focusing on Indonesia over the period 1993–2003. Rice is the staple food in Indonesia and we investigate whether its scarcity can be blamed for fueling violence. Following insights from the natural science literature, which claims that increases in minimum temperature reduce rice yields, we maintain that increases in minimum temperature reduce food availability in many provinces, which in turn raises the emergence of actual violence. We adopt an instrumental variable approach and select the instruments taking into account the rice growing calendar. Results show that an increase of the minimum temperature during the core month of the rice growing season, that is, December, determines an increase in violence stimulated by the reduction in future rice production per capita. Results are robust across a number of different functional specifications and estimation methods. From a methodological point of view, we claim that the inconclusive results obtained in this literature may be caused by an overlook of the correct bundle crop/temperature. Studies concentrating on several countries with different crops and using variations of average temperature as a measure of climate change missed the biological mechanism behind the relationship between climate change and violence.

This paper investigates the impact of corruption on economic growth in the Italian Regions. We estimate a dynamic growth model for the period 1980-2004 addressing both the potential bias of the measures of corruption and the endogeneity between corruption and economic development. We find strong evidence of a negative correlation between corruption and growth. Moreover, since government intervention has been traditionally used to reduce income differentials between the Northern and the Southern regions, we also analyze the interaction between corruption and government expenditure. Our results indicate that corruption undermines the positive impact that public expenditures have on economic growth.

This paper investigates the effect of the deployment of United Nations Blue Helmets on economic activity in South Sudan with a special focus on agricultural production Since UN troops are predicted to improve security, in particular, we expect a positive relationship between deployment of UN blue Helmets and cereal production. We test our hypothesis using an original dataset including all the 78 South Sudanese counties over the period 2009-2011. We control for the non-random assignment of UN troops through an Instrumental Variables approach. Our empirical results show that a 10% increase in the size of the troop allows the production of additional 600 tonnes.

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