Volume 25, Issue 1

We study how armed violence affected educational outcomes in Rwanda during the nineties, relying on two waves of population census data and on a difference-in-differences identification strategy. Results indicate that the violence caused a drop of about 1 year of education for the individuals exposed to the violence at schooling age. The drop was slightly larger for girls than for boys. While increased dropouts and school delays explain the drop in primary schooling, secondary schooling was mainly affected by a drop in enrolments. Finally, in a within-country analysis, we find no robust link between subnational variations in the drop in schooling and the intensity of the 1994 genocide – the most intense conflict event that took place in the country over the studied period. We present possible explanations for the observed patterns and provide related policy implications.

What role do whistleblowers play in democratic politics? This paper answers this question by analyzing the political economy of whistleblowing within democratic political institutions. Democratic politics is characterized by numerous principal-agent problems creating significant space for opportunism. Whistleblowers help to resolve these principal-agent problems through the revelation of information regarding abuses of power. These revelations can take place internally, by taking advantage of channels to report abuse, or externally, by publicly revealing information. The latter is especially important where internal mechanisms for reporting opportunism are lacking. Whistleblowing in the US national security state is presented to illustrate this logic.

Does military spending exacerbate income inequality? After the Cold War, many developed countries sought to reduce military expenditures in the face of a new security environment without the clear and present threat of large-scale international conflict. The literature has presented mixed evidence on the economic effects of military spending. Moreover, during this era analysts in the OECD have become preoccupied with the economic indicator of income equality. Our study examines the relationship between military expenditures and income inequality. Complementing the established literature on the subject, we find that these two phenomena indeed possess a positive relationship and it is unlikely that this association is due to random chance. Our results are robust to the inclusion of control variables common in the literature. These findings lead us to contemplate the historical and theoretical account of the peace dividend narrative.

In this paper, we empirically examine the effect of polity stability on economic growth and investment by using the dynamic panel estimation techniques for more than 100 countries over the period 1960–2009. Our initial results imply that democracy reduces growth in both developed and developing countries. However, there is no evidence for the existence of a significant effect of the democracy level on the overall, public and private investment. Our results also suggest that the growth and investment effects of polity stability proxied by regime durability and polity fragility measures greatly differ in developing and developed countries. Our empirical results indicate that polity stability promotes growth only in developing countries. It seems that regime durability and polity fragility affect economic growth mainly through investment. We also make a distinction between public and private investment when examining the effects of polity stability. It seems that the durability and fragility matter for private investment. Therefore, developing countries ought to put solid efforts to lessen polity instability to promote economic growth.

This study addresses the issue of threshold effects between general government debt and economic growth in Greece over the period 1970–2016. Using threshold models, there is evidence in favour of a negative association between general government debt and economic growth. The results indicate that the magnitude of this negative relationship between debt and growth depends on debt regimes. Also, the results seem to suggest that public debt might be associated with lower growth at low and moderate public debt levels. Specifically, at debt levels lower than 23.5 percent of GDP, increases in the general government debt-to-GDP ratio are associated with higher negative effect on economic growth, than at very high debt levels of 109.4 percent of GDP. The overall results could explain why general government debt was a significant drag on economic growth of Greece and that the crisis is far from over as thresholds are still binding.