Winning Hearts and Minds: Public Good Provision in the Shadow of Insurgency
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David Scoones
Abstract
A simple model of public good expenditure is developed where government service levels are affected by a potential insurgency. Counterinsurgency measures can reduce the effectiveness of resistance and alter the level of support for the government. In general, a very limited counterinsurgency is not useful; the government would rather alter the policy mix to reduce support for insurgents. In some cases, enhanced counterinsurgency capacity can lead to more rather than less resistance as the mix of projects adjusts to account for the lower effectiveness of resistance.
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- 1
What ultimately matters is the ratio of spending in these sectors. The fixed budget clarified this trade-off and is useful for construction of diagrams that follow below.
- 2
Scoones and Child (2012) develop the formal properties of this set, there denoted the “reconstruction possibility set,” for what, in the context here, amounts to a specific choice of m. In this paper, I describe its constructed, and simply assert the resulting form.
- 3
The government’s problem is worked out in detail in Scoones and Child (2012) for the case where the government has no recourse to counterinsurgency measures.
- 4
For some parameter values, there exists no equilibrium.
- 5
These experiments were conducted using Maple. The model is fully specified with the parameter assumed, and the diagrams are plotted from the simulated data.
- 6
Notice that the government preferences might be derived from those of some segment of the community. That is, the total population might select the government, and have a median “voter” with preferences (1). The “community” here represents a fringe group who has an extreme dislike for good b.
© 2013 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin / Boston
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Articles in the same Issue
- Shape and Consequences of Military Missions
- Mission Afghanistan: Who Bears the Heaviest Burden
- Policy Implications of Demographic Changes in the VHA Veteran Population Following OEF/OIF
- Fighting Piracy and International Public Goods: The Atalanta Experiment in the Horn of Africa V3
- How Many Wars Is the US Fighting Today?
- Shape and Consequences of Military Missions: An Introduction
- Winning Hearts and Minds: Public Good Provision in the Shadow of Insurgency
