Some prominent recent studies of civil war argue that greed, not grievance, is the primary motivating factor behind violence, basing their conclusions on a strong empirical association between primary commodity exports and civil war. This study contrasts alternative propositions that see need-, creed-, and governance-based explanations that are intimately related to the question of primary commodity dependence and conflict. Maximum likelihood analysis on approximately 138 countries over the entire postCold War period shows little support for neo-Malthusian claims. Abundant mineral wealth makes countries highly unstable, whereas scarcity of renewable resources is largely unrelated to civil conflict. A positive effect of population density on conflict does not seem to be conditioned by renewable resource scarcity. Ethnicity is related to conflict when society is moderately homogenous; a highly plural society faces less risk. Very slight political liberalization leads to conflict, but larger increases reduce the danger considerably, supporting the view that conflict is driven by opportunistic behaviour rather than by grievance. Increases in homogeneity among Islamic and Catholic populations make them riskier. Perhaps institutional factors relating to separation of church and state rather than competing creeds explain culture conflicts. Larger shares of both Christians and Muslims within countries make them safer, contrary to claims of natural antagonism between the two. Governance, proxied by the ratio of total trade to GDP, predicts peace strongly, an under-theorized area within the study of civil war. Trade's relationship to peace is robust to specification and sample size, supporting the findings of the State Failure Project. Greater attention should perhaps be paid to formal and informal institutional factors that create the synergy between private and public spaces for overcoming collective action problems of maintaining peace.
This paper presents a method for the analysis of socio-ecological patterns of vulnerability of people being at risk of losing their livelihoods as a consequence of global environmental change. This method fills a gap in methodologies for vulnerability analysis by providing generalizations of the factors that shape vulnerability in specific socio-ecological systems and showing their spatial occurrence. The proposed method consists of four steps that include both quantitative and qualitative analyses. To start, the socio-ecological system exposed to global environmental changes that will be studied needs to be determined. This could, for example, be farmers in drylands, urban populations in coastal areas and forest-dependent people in the tropics. Next, the core dimensions that shape vulnerability in the socio-ecological system of interest need to be defined. Subsequently, a set of spatially explicit indicators that reflect these core dimensions is selected. Cluster analysis is used for grouping the indicator data. The clusters found, referred to as vulnerability profiles, describe different typical groupings of conditions and processes that create vulnerability in the socio-ecological system under study, and their spatial distribution is provided. Interpretation and verification of these profiles is the last step in the analysis. We illustrate the application of this method by analysing the patterns of vulnerability of (smallholder) farmers in drylands. We identify eight distinct vulnerability profiles in drylands that together provide a global overview of different processes taking place and sub-national detail of their distribution. By overlaying the spatial distribution of these profiles with specific outcome indicators such as conflict occurrence or migration, the method can also be used to understand these phenomena better. Analysis of vulnerability profiles will in a next step be used as a basis for identifying responses to reduce vulnerability, for example, to facilitate the transfer of best practices to reduce vulnerability between different places.
ABSTRACT. Genuine saving is a measure of net investment in produced, natural and human capital. It is a necessary condition for weak sustainable development that genuine saving not be persistently negative. However, according to data provided by the World Bank, resource-rich countries are systematically failing to meet this condition. Alongside the well-known resource curse on economic growth, resource abundance might have a negative effect on genuine saving. In fact, the two are closely related, as future consumption growth is limited by insufficient genuine saving now. In this paper, we apply the most convincing conclusion from the literature on economic growth -that it is institutional failure that depresses growth -to data on genuine saving. We regress gross and genuine saving on three indicators of institutional quality in interaction with an indicator of resource abundance. The indicators of institutional quality are corruption, bureaucratic quality and the rule of law. We find that reducing corruption has a positive impact on genuine saving in interaction with resource abundance. That is, the negative effect of resource abundance on genuine saving is reduced as corruption is reduced.
SUMMARY Some claim that when level of property rights protection is controlled, democracy lowers foreign direct investment (FDI) to developing countries (Li and Resnick 2003). We critically examine the theoretical claims of the pessimistic arguments and show that FDI responds to preferences of countries and that democracies have a clear preference for FDI given that the scarce factor – capital – will find it harder under democracy to seek rents by raising barriers to entry. On the other hand, labor (the abundant factor in developing countries) should profit from lower barriers to capital importation. We demonstrate conclusively that the most prominent pessimistic result on democracy in the literature is simply an artefact of sample size and testing procedure. We establish robust evidence suggesting that developing country democracies actually receive higher inflows of FDI, net of a number of control variables. Consistent with our view that host nations' attitudes are shaped by factor endowments, which in turn determine rent‐seeking, we demonstrate that governments controlled by ‘leftist’ political parties also receive more FDI than ‘centrist’ or ‘rightist’ governments among democracies. Why this should be true is not obvious from a theory based on property rights risk alone. An extended sample of LDCs and a better operationalization show that property rights and democracy positively affect FDI. Our results suggest that globalization advances the fortunes of democracies in the developing world.
Summary. --The skeptics of globalization argue that increased trade openness and foreign direct investment induce developing countries to keep labor costs low, for example by letting children work. This article argues that there are good theoretical reasons why globalization might actually have the opposite effect. We test this with various measures of child labor and provide the first analysis of foreign investment in addition to trade. We present evidence that countries that are more open towards trade and/or have a higher stock of foreign direct investment also have a lower incidence of child labor. This holds for the labor force participation rate of 10 to 14 year old children, the secondary school non-attendance rate and a count measure of economic sectors with child labor incidence as the dependent variables. Globalization is associated with less, not more, child labor.
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