Volume 32, Issue 1

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.

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.

This article examines the impact of the Yemeni civil war on subjective well-being (SWB). Analyzing the relationship between regional war intensity and SWB for the period 2015–2023, while accounting for personal characteristics and regional fixed effects, we find a significant negative association between changes in fatality counts within a governorate and changes in SWB. In addition, the more recent political violence in a region, the stronger its negative effect on SWB.

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.

This note clarifies a number of methodological issues in the treatment of sectoral investment shocks in the article by Stamegna, M., C. Bonaiuti, P. Maranzano, and M. Pianta. 2024. “The Economic Impact of Arms Spending in Germany, Italy, and Spain.” Peace Economics, Peace Science and Public Policy 30 (4): 393–422. In particular, the distinction between purchasing and supplying industries is not consistently followed, leading to an inaccurate specification of the final-demand vector and of the associated import propensities. As a result, the estimated multipliers cannot be interpreted as multipliers of investment expenditure in the sectors considered. The note outlines the standard input–output conventions governing gross fixed capital formation and briefly indicates how a scenario-based approach would be required to analyse investment effects in a conceptually consistent manner.

This note responds to the comments by Garbellini (2026) on the treatment of demand shocks in the Input-Output model in Stamegna et al. (2024). We show that the increase in arms expenditure is correctly identified as an investment shock, while increases in public expenditure on environmental protection, education, and health services should be more appropriately interpreted as public consumption shocks. Once import shares consistent with this interpretation are applied, the central result of Stamegna et al. (2024) – namely, the higher employment effects of civilian expenditure relative to arms procurement – is further reinforced, with only minor changes in estimates. Furthermore, in Stamegna et al. (2024) the shares of arms imports are estimated using data for European countries and, even under a zero-import-share assumption, the main results are shown to be robust. Finally, we show that reducing the dimensionality of the Input-Output table yields results that are almost identical to those that we obtain here using the disaggregated tables.