journal: Peace Economics, Peace Science and Public Policy

Impact Factor: 1.2

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Peace Economics, Peace Science and Public Policy

Editor-in-Chief: Raul Caruso

Language: English

First published: January 1, 1993

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Peace Economics, Peace Science and Public Policy was founded in 1997 by Walter Isard, Professor Emeritus of Economics and Regional Science at Cornell University, and widely recognized as a founding father of Peace Science studies. Starting 2025, Peace Economics, Peace Science and Public Policy (PEPS) has been transferred to Gold Open Access on a year-by-year basis. All articles will thus immediately appear under the Creative Commons license CC BY. There will be no publication costs for the authors. The Open Access transformation is based on Information on Submission Process

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Bridging between theoretical and empirical studies
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Who Your Friends are Matters: Types of Supporters and Child Recruitment by Rebel Groups

October 30, 2025

Yun Jung Yang

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Child soldiering has been identified as one of the most prevalent human rights violations perpetrated by rebels. The aim of this research is to elucidate the potential influence of third parties, external supporters, on child soldiering by rebels. The research hypothesises that rebel’s likelihood of child recruitment could be differentiated depending on who the supporter is. The research argues that rebels with the backing of other insurgent groups are more likely to engage in child recruitment, whereas they may not engage in active child soldiering when having state supporters. The statistical results support the argument that rebels with rebel supporters are more likely to recruit child soldiers; however, the research also finds inconsistent outcomes on the impact of state supporters. This research emphasises the heterogeneity amongst types of supporters and contributes to the understanding of the relationships between external supporters and child recruitment, which has been relatively understudied.
Open Access
Exploring the Role of Institutional Quality in the Crowding-Out Effect of Military Expenditure on Health Expenditure and Outcomes in Africa

November 27, 2025

Jamiu Olamilekan Badmus, Isiaka Akande Raifu, Olaide Sekinat Balogun

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This study revisits the long-standing debate on the guns-versus-butter phenomenon, that spending on military activity crowds out non-military expenditure. By focusing on Africa, we conjecture the crowding-out effect of military expenditure on health expenditure beyond government health expenditure, but also private and out-of-pocket health expenditure, and health outcomes. The empirical analysis based on the dynamic two-step system generalized method of moments reveals that omitting institutional quality measures biases the estimated crowding-out effects of military expenditure. After the inclusion, the results indicate that a 10 % increase in military expenditure leads to a 0.40 % decline in government health expenditure, accompanied by 0.01 % and 0.30 % increases in private and out-of-pocket health expenditure, respectively. Regarding health outcomes, the same increase in military expenditure results in a 0.20 % rise in maternal mortality, while infant mortality and life expectancy decline by 0.09 % and 0.01 %, respectively. Further analysis reveals that including the interaction term of military expenditure and institutional quality only reverses the crowding-out effect on government health expenditure and not on private and out-of-pocket health expenditure. For health outcomes, the favorable effect of the interaction term is only evident in reducing infant and maternal mortality rates. We offer policy recommendations to improve fiscal spending on the health sector in Africa as a paramount measure to improve human capital development and provide areas for further empirical contributions.
Open Access
Gender Gap in Physical Activity: The Role of Conflicts and Political Instability

December 17, 2025

Marco Di Domizio

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This article takes as its starting point the warnings issued by the World Health Organization (WHO) on the perverse effects of a sedentary lifestyle on people’s health, resulting in additional health expenditure that diverts significant resources away from other areas of public spending. The research aims to empirically verify whether intra- and inter-state conflicts and political instability are associated with less active lifestyles among citizens, and whether sedentary lifestyles exacerbated by violent contexts have a different impact on men and women. The analysis is conducted by cross-referencing data on physical inactivity from WHO and data about ongoing conflicts and political instability in 192 countries from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) for the period 2000–2022. Despite the limitations due to the macroeconomic nature of the data compared to the microeconomic theoretical framework and the sensitivity of the results due to the introduction of education variables that distort the sample by reducing the amount of data for the poorest countries, our analysis showed a statistically significant negative association between the presence of inter- or intra-state conflicts and/or political instability, and physical activity. Furthermore, the analysis shows that the negative effects of the presence of conflict contexts on physical activity are not distributed evenly between men and women, being more intense for the latter. To our knowledge, this is the first study that attempts to verify, at the macroeconomic level, the effect of violence and instability on physical inactivity. The shift from a microeconomic approach to macroeconomic analysis represents the main limitation of this study, but it nevertheless is a first attempt to verify how contexts pervaded by violence can generate less healthy lifestyles and how these can, albeit only in part, explain gender differences in sedentary behavior.

Reflections on the post COVID-19 World edited by Raul Caruso and Arzu Kibris

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Issue 1

Issue 4

Proceedings of the 19th Jan Tinbergen European Peace Science Conference

Proceedings of the 18th Jan Tinbergen European Peace Science Conference

Proceedings of the 17th Jan Tinbergen European Peace Science Conference

Special Issue: Proceedings of the 16th Jan Tinbergen European Peace Science Conference

Proceedings of the 15th Jan Tinbergen European Peace Science Conference

Special Issue: Proceedings of 14th Jan Tinbergen European Peace Science Conference / Edited by Raul Caruso and Ismene Gizelis

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Special Issue: Advances in Peace Economics and Peace Science

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Special Issue: Conflict, Crime and Violence in Colombia / Edited by Raul Caruso and Juan F. Vargas

Issue 3

Proceedings of the 13th Jan Tinbergen European Peace Science Conference / Edited by Tobias Böhmelt and Petros G. Sekeris

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Proceedings of the 12th Jan Tinbergen European Peace Science Index – edited by Guest Editors Vincenzo Bove & Andrea Ruggeri

Issue 2

"Political Economy Studies on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict" Special issue edited by Esteban F. Klor and Raul Caruso

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Issue 2

On the Definition and Domain of Peace Economics, Papers in Honor of Walter Isard

Journal Impact Factor	1.2	2024, Journal Citation Reports (Clarivate, 2025)
5-year Journal Impact Factor	1	2024, Journal Citation Reports (Clarivate, 2025)
Journal Citation Indicator	0.74	2024, Journal Citation Reports (Clarivate, 2025)
CiteScore	2.8	2024, Scopus (Elsevier B.V., 2025)
SCImago Journal Rank	0.436	2024, SJR (Scimago Lab, 2025; Data Source: Scopus)
Source Normalized Impact per Paper	0.765	2024, CWTS Journal Indicators (CWTS B.V., 2025; Data Source: Scopus)

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Editor-in-Chief
Raul Caruso, Department of Economic Policy, Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, Milan, Italy and CESPIC, Catholic University Our Lady of Good Counsel, Tirana, Albania

To contact the PEPS editorial office, please email peps@degruyter.com

Founding Editor
*Walter Isard, Cornell University, USA

Editorial Board
*Kenneth Arrow, Stanford University, USA
Jean-Paul Azam, Toulouse School of Economics, France
Iwan Azis, Cornell University, USA
S. Brock Blomberg, Claremont Mckenna College, USA
Vinvenzo Bove, University of Warwick, UK
Subhasish Modak Chowdhury, University of Bath
Raymond Dacey, University of Idaho, USA
John P. Dunne, University of Cape Town, South Africa
*Michael D. Intriligator, University of California, Los Angeles, USA
Helena Hinkkainen, University of Leeds
Arzu Kibris, University of Warwick, UK
D. Marc Kilgour, Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada
Esteban Klor, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel
Christos Kollias, University of Thessaly, Greece
Urs Luterbacher, Graduate Institute of International Studies Geneva, Switzerland
Johannes Münster, University of Cologne, Germany
Mansoob Murshed, ISS/Erasmus University and Coventry University, Netherlands and the University of Birmingham, UK
Enzo Nussio, ETH Zurich
Solomon Polachek, Binghamton University, USA
Marta Reynal-Querol, Pompeu Fabra University, Spain
Roberto Ricciuti, University of Verona, Italy
*Thomas C. Schelling, University of Maryland, USA
Petros Sekeris, Montpellier Business School, France
Carlos Seiglie, Rutgers University, USA
Anja Shortland, King’s College London, UK
Stergios Skaperdas, University of California, Irvine, USA
Juan Fernando Vargas, Del Rosario University, Columbia
Marijke Verpoorten, University of Antwerp, Sweden

*Walter Isard (1919 – 2010)
*Michael D. Intriligator (1938 – 2014)
*Thomas C. Schelling (1921 – 2016)
*Kenneth Arrow (1921 – 2017)

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eISSN:

1554-8597

ISSN:

1079-2457

Language:

English

Publisher:

De Gruyter

Additional information

First published:

January 1, 1993

eISSN: 1554-8597

ISSN: 1079-2457

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Scholars from a variety of disciplines including economics, political science, regional science, mathematics, history, and others related

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