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What are the common characteristics among radicalized individuals, willing to justify attacks targeting civilians? Drawing on information on attitudes toward extreme violence and other characteristics of 30,787 individuals from 27 developing countries around the world, and employing a variety of econometric techniques, this paper identifies the partial correlates of extremism. The results suggest that the typical extremist who supports attacks against civilians is more likely to be young, unemployed and struggling to make ends meet, relatively uneducated, and not as religious as others, but more willing to sacrifice own life for his or her beliefs. Gender and marital status are not found to explain significantly the individual-level variation in attitudes toward extremism. Although these results may vary in magnitude and significance across countries and geographic regions, they are robust to various sensitivity analyses.

Many oil, mineral, and plantation crop-based economies experienced a substantial deceleration in growth following the commodity boom and bust of the 1970s and early 1980s. This article illustrates how countries dependent on point source natural resources (those extracted from a narrow geographic or economic base, such as oil and minerals) and plantation crops are predisposed to heightened economic and social divisions and weakened institutional capacity. This in turn impedes their ability to respond effectively to shocks, which previous studies have shown to be essential for sustaining rising levels of prosperity. Analysis of data on classifications of export structure, controlling for a wide array of other potential determinants of governance, shows that point source and coffee and cocoa exporting countries do relatively poorly across an array of governance indicators. These governance effects are not associated simply with being a natural resource exporter. Countries with natural resource exports that are diffuse relying primarily on livestock and agricultural produce from small family farms do not show the same strong effects and have had more robust growth recoveries.

This paper focuses on recent theoretical developments in political economy and what role they might play in explaining and reforming individual country and global distortions in food and agricultural markets. Four groups of forces are isolated: political governance structures emphasizing the role of democratic mechanisms; the design of polycentric structures for assigned governmental authority for setting policy instruments; market structure and other socioeconomic characteristics; and the role of sector mobility and asset diversification. Each of these forces are distilled and data sources are reviewed that will allow econometric specifications that have both explanatory and policy reform implications.