Volume 18, Issue 1

We introduce a simple growth model to investigate how the evolution of a society is influenced by international conflicts. We come to the result that in the long run three equilibria are possible; a war equilibrium, a peace equilibrium or cycles between war and peace. Which kind of equilibrium will be achieved depends on the effectiveness of weapons, the distribution of capital, intertemporal preferences and the production technology. In general, we conclude that the achievement of a long-lasting sustainable peace is possible, if we restrict the degree of economic inequality. The model delivers a normative reasoning for the foundation and the conservation of the European Union, even if redistribution of national incomes must take place to conserve it.

This article illustrates how fine continuous and categorical measures of genocide intensity can be derived from the records of the Rwandan transitional justice system. The data, which include the number of genocide suspects and genocide survivors across 1484 administrative sectors, are highly skewed and contain a non-negligible number of outlying observations. A number of genocide proxies are subjected to Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to obtain a genocide index, and the effect of survival bias on this index is reduced by augmenting the set of genocide proxies subjected to PCA with the distance from an administrative sector to the nearest mass grave. Finally, the administrative sectors are divided into distinct categories of low, moderate and high genocide intensity by means of Local Indicators of Spatial Auto-Correlation (LISA) that allow identifying significant high-high and low-low clusters of genocide intensity.

In the countries that experience the problem of inter-class conflict, the self-interested elite tend to pursue allocation policies that maximize their own welfare. In the absence of the binding revolutionary constraint, under some conditions, the amount of public goods provided is too low, relative to the optimal level of public good from the perspective of general welfare. With the revolutionary constraint, there exists a set of parameter values whereby the elite provide strictly positive amount of public goods. With unconditional foreign aid, there is no guarantee that the elite will use these additional resources to finance public good provision. For conditional foreign aid, the conditionality requirements depend on the degree of transparency of the recipient country.

This paper uses an events data set for the post-Cold War era to measure the impact of trade interdependence on three different types of dyadic interactions: political, military, and economic. The paper extends the literature on trade and peace by estimating a model in which trade and interstate interactions are treated as endogenous. We also move beyond the common measure of conflict as the use of force to consider different types and levels of conflict that fall short of war. We find that trade significantly raises net cooperation on political and economic interactions, but trade does not improve net cooperation over military issues. By allowing for mutual causality between cooperation and trade, we show that more cooperation on political and military issues leads to greater trade between countries. Moreover, the impact of overall cooperation on trade is larger than the effect of trade on cooperation. An important lesson from the paper is that the relationship between trade and net cooperation depends on the type of interstate relations being examined. The general findings are supported even after performing a number of robustness checks.

Remittances have been recognized as an important determinant of economic growth for Sub-Saharan African economies as they can finance other determinants that constitute drivers of growth. To the extent that remittances finance terrorism, they can also inhibit economic growth as terrorism can constrain important drivers of growth such as investment and consumption expenditures. In this paper, we appeal to a theory of rational terrorism and consider whether remittances to Sub-Saharan Africa finance terrorism. We estimate the parameters of a static and dynamic terrorism incident supply function with maximum likelihood and Generalized Estimating Equation count data estimators for Sub-Saharan Africa between 1974 and 2006. Our parameter estimates suggest that for Sub-Saharan Africa, remittances are a source of finance for terrorism. We find that approximately one terrorism incident is financed in Sub-Saharan Africa for remittance inflows that range between approximately one quarter of a million dollars and one million dollars.

The purpose of this note is to present a surprising result regarding crisis initiation and termination. The decision problem treated here is distilled from an extension of the two-sided incomplete information version of the traditional deterrence game. We employ a two-stage analysis of the decision problem faced by the Challenger that formally links the onset of a crisis to the decision over whether to escalate the crisis should the Challenger face resistance from the Defender. The two-part result is as follows. A crisis is more likely to be initiated by a Challenger who will ultimately back down if Defender chooses to resist than by a Challenger of the same type who will choose to escalate if Defender chooses to resist. Contrariwise, a crisis is less likely to be initiated by a Challenger who will ultimately escalate if Defender chooses to resist than by a Challenger of the same type who will choose to back down if Defender chooses to resist.