Volume 24, Issue 2

This study examines determinants of leftist violence at the municipal level in Colombia from 2000 through 2010. A multilevel GLMM model with a negative binomial distribution is used to take advantage of the information available at the municipal and department level. Surprisingly, inequality was not a significant covariate of violence, and agricultural GDP tended to reduce, instead of increase, guerrilla violence. The main risk factors identified include physical characteristics such as rugged topography and prior violence, but also factors that are candidates for policy action, such as unemployment, incorporation of the poor into public services, repression, and the energy and mining sector. These findings suggest interventions to decrease risks of guerrilla violence beyond merely strengthening the state. While repression tends to escalate violence, targeted policies to provide health benefits to those currently underserved, and securing mining and oil operations can effectively reduce the risk of violence.

Several studies estimate the effects of commodity export prices on economic outcomes, such as conflict and democratic transitions. In this note, we argue that it is important to control for the effects of import prices due to two reasons. First, economic theory predicts that both import and export prices affect the economy’s performance, which can, in turn, affect its conflict propensity. Second, the facts that import prices might affect the conflict risk and that import and export prices can be correlated imply that the failure to control for import price effects can bias the export price coefficients. We illustrate these points using the dataset and one of the regression specifications in a recent civil war study.

The aim of this paper is to examine the relationship between food insecurity and conflict events short of war in Africa, taking account of a host of mediating factors, including the degree of inequality, the level of development, democratic quality, quality of governance and the degree of government expenditure, which we incorporate into our analysis. Our results suggest that food price volatility does contribute significantly to conflict events measured by political events in Africa (ACLED). Greater democracy can engender more conflict, but in a non-linear fashion. The broader V-DEM participatory index of democracy also encourages more protest. Our governance variables are significant, emphasising the salience of state capacity in this regard. An innovation of our study is the inclusion of inequality. We deploy two metrics of vertical inequality: the GINI coefficient and the broader V-DEM egalitarian index. The GINI index of income inequality has a counter-intuitive statistically insignificant sign, suggesting that greater income equality or middle-class share of income results in greater political unrest. We also utilise political measures of inter-group horizontal inequality which significantly engender conflict risk.

With compulsory funded public social security systems, pension savings constitute a large stock of assets. In this paper we consider an economy populated by overlapping generations, which may decide about abolishing the funded system and replacing it with the pay-as-you-go scheme (i.e. unprivatizing the pension system). We compare politically stable as well as politically unstable reforms and show that even if the funded system is overall welfare enhancing, the cohort distribution of benefits along the transition path may turn privatizing social security politically unsustainable.

In this note we use dyadic data to address the issue of the spread of political regimes in Sub-Saharan Africa from 1977 to 2014. Dyadic data are binary relationship between countries and provide a data-rich environment for the study of international relations. We address the issue of correlation between these dyadic observations, which generates a cluster of dependent observations associated with that country. We find that borders matter, since often the effect of home- and foreign-grown variables have differentiated effects on democracy in one country.