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Scholars note that rebel atrocities against civilians often arise within rural areas in the developing world. This characterization is not far-fetched, and recent data show that rebel atrocities do predominately occur within rural agricultural regions. Yet the frequency of such incidents also varies substantially across different agricultural regions and years. What accounts for this observed variation in rebel-perpetrated atrocities against civilians within agricultural areas in developing countries? We develop a formal model to address this question, which contends that severe droughts can decrease food availability, prompting civilians to allocate food for immediate consumption and become increasingly willing to defend their diminishing supplies against rebels. This leads rebels to preempt the civilians’ defensive efforts by committing atrocities, which forcibly separate civilians from their lands and food stockpiles. In empirically testing this hypothesis at the subnational level across the developing...

We present a dynamic, complete-information bargaining model of war with N countries. The analysis of a network with more than two countries significantly generalizes previous work. We consider an environment where a country’s military strength varies stochastically over time as a function of endogenous consumption. If countries are sufficiently patient, then war is inevitable and will quickly spread throughout the network. We leverage insights from the limiting case to identify two key factors that promote peace among countries with limited patience: peace is easier to sustain when countries have equal military strength or when mechanisms exist to preserve any existing inequalities. Varying the number of countries does not have a consistent effect.

The authors use a 13-year panel of individuals in Tanzania to assess how adult mortality shocks affect both short and long-run consumption growth of surviving household members. Using unique data which tracks individuals from 1991 to 2004, they examine consumption growth, controlling for a set of initial community, household and individual characteristics. The effect is identified using the sample of households in 2004 which grew out of baseline households. The authors find robust evidence that an affected household will see consumption drop 7 percent within the first five years after the adult death. With high growth in the sample over this time period, this creates a 19 percentage point growth gap with the average household. There is some evidence of persistent effects of these shocks for up to 13 years, but these effects are imprecisely estimated and not significantly different from zero. The impact of female adult death is found to be particularly severe.

The political economies of many developing nations consist of both corporatist and dualist tendencies' that engender unique incomedetermination processes compared to those of Western nations.2 Institutional theories of income inequality, such as the dual economy and dual labor market theories, which were developed on the empirical basis of predominantly urban and industrialized Western nations, consequently should be modified in order to explain income inequality in developing nations.3 We argue that the recency of industrialization in many developing nations has engendered a dualism that takes the form of urban and rural segments,a neglected dimension of segmentation in institutional theories of income inequality. Urban-rural segmentation, in turn, affects the income-determination process in developing nations because the societal functions, economic strategies, and labor-supply behavior of the family, a "work structure" that has been neglected by institutional theories of income inequality,4 vary across urban and rural segments.5 Family economic strategies, according to Tamara Hareven, "involve explicit or implicit choices families make for the present, for the immediate future, or for long-term needs."6 Industrialization has led to a shift in family economic strategy and function from a "collective production unit" to a "consumption unit, in which members follow individual careers."7 This implies that the economic strategies and functions of urban and rural families differ in developing nations. In developing nations, urban families may approximate individualistic consumption units, while rural families may approximate collective production units. These urban-rural differences in family strategies, in

The flood of economic information from China in recent years has permitted reassessment of the "Chinese model of development" and the extent to which China's own development experience has conformed to it. The prevailing consensus of the 1970s concerning the substance of the model itself-typically characterized in terms of the Chinese leadership's objectives and priorities and its strategy for pursuing them-has stood up quite well. The same cannot be said about past appraisals of the extent to which China's economic reality has been reshaped to accord with the model's prescriptions. One of the most widely remarked elements of the Chinese model is the high priority assigned to regional objectives and, more specifically, to "balance" in the distribution of productive capacity and equity in the distribution of income and, hence, consumption. During the Maoist era (i.e., prior to 1979), the central government pursued regional objectives through such measures as interregional transfers of investment resources (effected via the planning system), subsidization of health and education expenditures in poor regions, and attempts to maintain a safety net of state relief (effected largely via control of grain surpluses). In short, there is little doubt that prior to 1979 the Chinese leadership placed an unusually high value on the spread of modern growth and the improvements in welfare associated with it and persistently acted to limit the emergence or widening of interregional disparities.' Although China's post-Mao leaders have shown greater concern with efficiency and with the potential trade-offs between efficiency and such goals as balance and equity, their continuation of many redistributive policies indicates that they have not abandoned regional objectives. But how successful has China been in achieving these objectives?

This paper attempts first to examine the applicability of traditional consumption function models to poor developing countries (hereafter LDCs) by fitting them to Korean data for the post-Korean War period following the approach in the Modigliani-Tarantelli (MT) study. In doing so the results of consumption function estimates for Korea a poor LDC are compared with those for Italy a rich LDC as reported in the MT study. The present paper then develops a new consumption function for poor LDCs such as Korea characterized by low per capita income a relatively large rural sector and rapid industrialization and urbanization. Koreas consumption and income data have been compiled and refined for many years and are good quality for our purposes. In addition to national income data Koreas urban household survey and the farm household survey have been compiled since 1963. (excerpt)