Band 24, Heft 3

This paper presents results from a study of the comparative effects of microfinance group lending, and individual lending technologies on measures of women’s political capital in a fragile conflict-affected setting. Based on a quasi-experiment in Liberia, the two lending technologies were found to have significant effects on different measures of women’s political capital, though the effects were greater for the group lending technology than those of the individual lending. The different effects are due to the program orientation of the two lending technologies which facilitate the development of more resources for communal activism and democratic values among group lending than individual lending borrowers. This impact of this effect will be minimal if factors that constrain the women’s ability to invest their political capital are not addressed. Although more evidence would be required in order to generalize these results, they provide us insights about the political contribution of an economic intervention to post-conflict reconstruction.

Using a dynamic panel approach, this article examines the determinants of military expenditures for 29 Asian and Oceanian countries during 1992–2016. A two-step difference-GMM estimator is applied. Both the impact of Chinese and US military expenditure on sample countries’ military budgets are considered. Results show that sample countries do not respond to Chinese military expenditure; however, these countries respond to US military expenditure. Moreover, lagged military expenditure, GDP, population, and trade openness are important determinants of military spending, while wars and regime type are not.

This paper takes advantage of the new extended military expenditures dataset from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) to estimate demand for military expenditures model for the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. The extended dataset affords us to adopt robust dynamic panel estimation techniques along with a set of threat and strategic interaction proxies. Our analysis indicates that status seeking (“peer pressure”) explains the bulk of the demand for military spending in the region. We also note a significant trade-off between military and social spending, somewhat mitigating the arms race implied by status. “Resource Curse” is not a significant determinant of military spending in the region especially when applying a robust dynamic specification. We find negative and weak response to local and regional threats suggesting the need for more sophistication in the design of threat proxies.

This study investigates the effect of military expenditure on the exploding external debt in five major South Asian economies, i.e. Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, Nepal and Sri Lanka from 1990 to 2015 using panel fixed effect regression model. The estimated result reveals that the external debt of selected South Asian countries is positively determined by their military expenditure, and negatively explained by their domestic investment activities. The study urges the efficient utilization of available capital resources into more productive investment activities to create employment for the labor force. The future prosperity of the region lies in the peaceful resolution of all outstanding disputes and a corresponding reduction in military spending that can make the region safe for domestic and international investments.

This paper presents empirical evidence for nonlinear relationship between education attainment and participation in political violence. The results are based on unweighted and weighted Probit estimations using a consolidated dataset of 200 militants and representative sample of over 13,000 Pakistanis. The results reveal that likelihood of participation in political violence increases with education attainment. However, the response of education attainment to political violence is diverse and those with education around high school are more likely to engage in political violence than any other level of education. At no level of education, the likelihood for participation in political violence is found to be negative. Hence, while political violence seems to be associated with literacy, there are noteworthy variations in the extent to which literacy affects political violence.