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Background: Although the problem of obstetric violence (OV) is receiving increasing attention among academics and policy makers, the prevalence and associated factors of OV are still poorly understood. The fear of OV prevents women from giving birth in health facilities, which is crucial for the effectiveness of HIV prevention programs, such as the Prevention of Mother to Child Transmission (PMTCT) program. Objective: The aim of this paper is to determine the prevalence of OV, the comparative burden and associated predictors between HIV positive and negative women in Ghana. Methods: The present study is a facility-based cross-sectional study enrolling 2,142 women, of which 310 were HIV positive and 1,832 HIV negative with a birth history of 0-24 months. The women were enrolled consecutively using a two stage sampling technique from eight hospitals with antiretroviral clinics across two regions in Ghana. The primary outcome variable was the experience of OV and its various forms. Descriptive data is presented in tables and reported in frequencies. The inferential analysis has been performed by estimating the Adjusted Odds Ratios (AOR) using multivariate logistic regression. Results: Prevalence of OV was slightly lower among HIV positive women (61.0%) compared to HIV negative women (65.1%), though this was not statistically significant (χ2=1.99; p=0.158). The most common sub-category of OV experienced by all women was non-confidential care (35.2%). HIV positive women experienced more abandoned care (32.6%) with non-consented care being the least prevalent form of OV. Experience of discrimination was higher among HIV positive women (13.5%) than HIV negative women (10.8%). The multivariate regression analysis of the predictors of OV suggests that HIV positive women are not more likely to experience OV. Instead, we find evidence that HIV positive women are less likely to be subjected to physical violence (AOR=0.512; CI: 0.369-0.710), non-consented care (AOR=0.457; CI: 0.244-0.859) and non-dignified care (AOR= 0.688; CI: 0.513-0.923). Conclusions: The study shows high rates of OV among all women. However, we found no evidence that HIV positive women were at higher risk to experience OV than HIV negative women. Evidence based interventions are required to address OV due to its threat to facility-based childbirth and the PMTCT cascade of care.

In this paper we study how radical political factions secure support. In order to achieve their objective of gaining support, radical political factions can choose from a number of specific strategies. They can provide financial assistance and generate a reciprocal relationship with their beneficiaries (political clientelism). On the other hand, financial assistance from other, non-radical sources, may raise the opportunity cost from militant policies performed by radical factions, making recipients of such financial assistance less likely to support radicals (opportunity cost theory). Smaller payments may induce loyalty, especially if the assistance is part of a "club good" offered by the radical faction, (club good theory). Costly forms of political violence by the radical faction signal resolve and may attract more support, (outbidding theory). We examine all four tactics for the case of Hamas, a radical faction in the Palestinian National Authority. We exploit a unique dataset that includes the sources and extent of assistance received by Palestinian households, data on Israeli and Palestinian fatalities as well as data on the level of support for particular Palestinian factions. We find that residents of districts that receive assistance from religious charities are more likely to support Hamas, even though this support is relatively small in monetary terms. These support patterns are in line with existing theory on armed religious groups as club good providers. By comparison, residents of districts who receive more material aid from Palestinian Authority agencies are more likely to support Fatah, except in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip. Finally, aid from international organizations is associated with support for moderate factions and decreased support of radical factions. While it is possible that charities only target districts and households that support them, testing for reverse causality, by regressing charity support on lagged political preferences, yields no such evidence.

As part of recording the progress toward promoting peaceful societies as envisioned in the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 16, it is important to provide accurate estimates of violence-related deaths (SDG 16.1). These estimations face a number of methodological challenges, resulting in rather conservative estimates in the social sciences. In this article, we discuss SDG indicator 16.1.2 on conflict-related deaths, proposing its enlargement to cover different forms of collective violence. Various types of collective violence, their definition, measurement, and methods to combine them without double counting are reviewed. Comparing the Georeferenced Events Dataset (GED) to the Global Terrorism Database (GTD) shows that events of armed conflict and terrorism overlap to a certain degree. Our argument is that merging data from different event databases can provide a more accurate account of collective violence. We augment the GED data on organized armed conflict with data on terrorism—as a result, our estimates of the numbers of collective violence-related deaths are indeed significantly higher than suggested by GED (one of the most widely used databases in the social sciences).

War and crises affect mental health, social attitudes, and cultural norms, which can exacerbate the state of long-term insecurity. With decades of armed conflict, the Democratic Republic of Congo is one example, and violence has become normalized in civilian settings. In this study, we tested the effectiveness of the NETfacts health system, an integrated model of evidence-based individual trauma treatment (Narrative Exposure Therapy [NET]) and a trauma-informed community-based intervention (NETfacts). Alongside changes in mental health outcomes (posttraumatic stress disorder, depression, social disapproval, and shame) we also investigated change in attitudes, including rape myth acceptance, stigmatization of survivors of sexual violence, and skepticism about the reintegration of former combatants. To test whether the additional community intervention is superior to individual NET alone, we implemented a randomized controlled design with six villages and interviewed a sample of 1,066 community members. Our results demonstrate that the NETfacts health system in comparison with NET alone more effectively reduced rape myth acceptance and with it ongoing victimization and perpetration. Community members of the NETfacts group also presented with less stigmatizing attitudes against survivors of sexual violence. Skepticism about the reintegration of former combatants declined in both groups. NETfacts appears to have increased motivation to engage in individual treatment. Synergizing the healing effects of individual and collective trauma exposure, the NETfacts health system appears to be an effective and scalable approach to correct degrading or ignominious norms and restore functioning and mental health in postconflict communities.

Peace is fragile, about half of all peace episodes break down within the first eight post‐conflict years. In Sub‐Saharan Africa this risk is even higher. Using survival analysis this paper suggests that while it is difficult to find correlates of peace stabilization, there are some policy relevant results. How a conflict ends is important. Negotiated settlements are fragile but the chances of peace surviving can be significantly improved through the deployment of UN peacekeeping operations. This also appears to be the case for Sub‐Saharan Africa but case study evidence suggests that peacekeepers face particularly complex situations in the region and should therefore be well resourced in order to increase their chance of success. published

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Post-conflict societies face two distinctive challenges: economic recovery and risk reduction. Aid and policy reforms have been found to be highly effective in the economic recovery. In this paper we concentrate on the other challenge, risk reduction. The post-conflict peace is typically fragile: around half of all civil wars are due to post-conflict relapses. Both external actors and the post-conflict government must therefore give priority to reducing the risk of conflict. Our statistical results suggest that economic development does substantially reduce risks, but it takes a long time. We also find evidence that UN peacekeeping expenditures significantly reduce the risk of renewed war. The effect is large: doubling expenditure reduces the risk from 40% to 31%. In contrast to these results we cannot find any systematic influence of elections on the reduction of war risk. Therefore, post-conflict elections should be promoted as intrinsically desirable rather than as mechanisms for increasing the durability of the post-conflict peace. Based on these results we suggest that peace appears to depend upon an external military presence sustaining a gradual economic recovery, with political design playing a somewhat subsidiary role. Since there is a simple and statistically strong relationship between the severity of post-conflict risks and the level of income at the end of the conflict this provides a clear and uncontroversial principle for resource allocation: resources per capita should be approximately inversely proportional to the level of income in the post-conflict country.

In mature democracies, elections discipline leaders to deliver good economic performance. Since the fall of the Soviet Union most developing countries also hold elections, but these are often marred by illicit tactics. Using a new global data set, this paper investigates whether these illicit tactics are merely blemishes or substantially undermine the economic efficacy of elections. We show that illicit tactics are widespread, and that they reduce the incentive for governments to deliver good economic performance. Revisiting the celebrated result that ‘leaders matter’, we show that it is dependent upon the absence of clean elections: changes of leader matter a lot in systems without clean elections, whereas in those with clean elections they are not significant.

In this paper we investigate the efficacy of illicit electoral tactics and the characteristics which make a society prone to such tactics. We first investigate the chances of an incumbent head of government winning an election. We find that in those elections in which illicit tactics were prevalent the chances of incumbent victory increase substantially, more than doubling the expected duration in office. Further, illicit tactics sharply reduce the importance of good economic performance for survival in office. We then investigate what makes a society prone to illicit electoral tactics. Both structural conditions and institutions matter. Societies that are small, low-income, and resource-rich have little chance of a clean election unless these conditions are offset by checks and balances such as veto points and a free press. Aid has offsetting effects, the net effect being modest. We show that these results are robust to different measures of the conduct of elections and to fixed effects. Finally, we revisit the Jones-Olken result that individual leaders matter for economic performance and find that it holds only where leaders are not disciplined by well-conducted elections.

This article is concerned with explaining why peace endures in countries that have experienced a civil armed conflict. We use a mixed methods approach by evaluating six case studies (Burundi, East Timor, El Salvador, Liberia, Nepal, Sierra Leone) and survival analysis that allows us to consider 205 peace episodes since 1990. We find that it is difficult to explain why peace endures using statistical analysis but there is some indication that conflict termination is important in post-conflict stabilisation: negotiated settlements are more likely to break down than military victories. We also consider the impact of UN peacekeeping operations on the duration of peace but find little evidence of their contribution. However, in situations where UN peacekeeping operations are deployed in support of negotiated settlements they do seem to contribute to peace stabilisation.

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In this paper we determine the burden on society of fatalities resulting from road traffic injuries (RTIs) in South Africa. We express the burden in terms of reduced life expectancy and years of potential life lost (YPLL). Our main data source is the Injury Mortality Survey (IMS), a retrospective descriptive study carried out in South Africa. Using the mortality rates by sex and age from the IMS we calculate actual life expectancy at birth. In our counterfactual analysis we assume a 15 % reduction in road fatalities per year over a period of 10 years. A comparison of the estimated actual and counterfactual life expectancies suggests that the average gain in life expectancy at birth would be 0.58 years. Since the overwhelming majority of road traffic fatalities are male (75.7 %), there is a considerable gender difference. Men would gain on average 0.85 years while women would gain 0.30 years in life expectancy, closing the gender gap in life expectancy by about 14 %. We then discuss how a reduction in RTIs could be achieved. South Africa’s legislation addresses several of the important aspects of road safety (e.g. seat belt use, drink driving restrictions, speed limits, infrastructure improvements), however, enforcement is relatively weak and should be improved. There are a raft of measures that have been well researched in other countries, most interventions aim to modify the behaviour of road users and have been found to be cost effective. In addition to stricter enforcement, evidence from social science suggests that compliance could be increased through a change in social norms regarding road usage.

Using global data we examine the dynamics of migration from developing to developed countries. Origin and destination countries are characterized by substantial differences in incomes, political rights and cultures. Incentives as well as costs shape the decision to migrate. One powerful dynamic effect is that diasporas increase migration, mainly because they lower the cost of migration. Diasporas assist the next wave of migrants by overcoming the high cost of the emigration, in particular when the origin country is far away and poor. The interaction between the diaspora and cultural distance is also significant. Diasporas in culturally distant countries appear to be particularly useful in overcoming the cost of migration. Culturally distant diasporas are less likely to assimilate and maintain closer links with their country of origin, while diasporas from culturally similar countries are more likely to assimilate and thus be less useful to potential new migrants.

Organised armed conflict is a problem that occurs predominantly in low and middle-income countries. Thus, there is a strong link between security and development, and the United Nation’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development specifically aims to create peaceful and inclusive societies (SDG 16). This chapter uses global data to describe the patterns of violence and discusses the possible policy instruments for violence reduction. The development community has focused on political violent conflict, excluding almost all other forms of collective violence (e.g. organised crime) and interpersonal violence (e.g. homicide). However, all of these other forms of violence have serious welfare and development consequences, and governments/supranational authorities need to recognise that violence reduction strategies should target all forms of violence. The empirical evidence suggests that the reduction in the availability of arms and regulations on illicit drugs and alcohol as well changes in norms can reduce violence.

The focus in the security and development debate is on collective violence and the World Bank’s World Development Report 2017 is typical by mainly considering the effects of organized armed conflict. In this article I argue that interpersonal violence affects many more people globally and should receive more attention as well as aid. The adverse consequences from interpersonal violence on socioeconomic development are likely to be large but much of this violence is hidden in plain sight. Women and children are at particularly high risk of being victims of violence but since most of this violence is perpetrated in the domestic sphere it is less likely to affect the collective conscience.

Michael J. Boyle. (2014). Violence after War: Explaining Instability in Post-Conflict States . Baltimore, John Hopkins University Press, 433 pp., hardcover (ISBN 13: 978-1-4214-1257-3). Michael Boyle’s book provides an excellent contribution in the area of security studies. The focus is firmly on postwar countries. This is a very important topic for a number of reasons. First, since the end of the Cold War we have experienced a downward trend in the prevalence and incidence of war. As a consequence, there are now many countries that fall within the postwar category. Second, this postwar peace is fragile, about forty percent of wars restart within a decade (Collier, Hoeffler, and Soderbom 2008), and the overwhelming majority of civil wars take place in countries that have previously experienced a war (Walter 2014). A better understanding of the challenges to postwar peace provides policy advice that could help prevent these cycles of war. The defining characteristic of war is large-scale organized violence, and Boyle makes violence the central theme in his investigation. Economic, political, and social consequences of the war also receive a lot of discussion, but to my mind the clear focus on violence makes this book a particularly valuable contribution to the emerging literature on postwar peace. Boyle provides two chapters in which he categorizes types of violence and the pathways through which violence threatens the peace. Five in-depth case studies—Bosnia-Herzegovina, Rwanda, Kosovo, East Timor, and Iraq—follow, and the last chapter draws conclusions based on the theoretical concepts and the empirical evidence. Boyle defines three different categories of violence: expressive, instrumental, and strategic. Expressive violence is an … anke.hoeffler{at}economics.ox.ac.uk

This paper presents estimates of the global cost of collective and interpersonal violence. This includes war, terrorism, homicides, assaults and domestic violence against women and children. The cost of conventionally defined interpersonal violence, i.e. homicides and assault, are about 7.5 times higher than the cost due to war and terrorism. I also estimate the costs of non-fatal domestic violence against children and women and suggest that these costs are much higher than the combined costs of homicide, assault, terrorism and war. The main reason is that the prevalence of these types of violence is very high: possibly as many as 16 per cent of all children are punished using violent methods and about 12 per cent of all women experience intimate partner violence. Richer societies have lower levels of violence and there is evidence that prevalence rates have been declining over time. However, it is often unclear why this is the case. Much of the evidence from violence reducing interventions comes from high income countries and it is uncertain whether these programs would be similarly effective in low and middle income countries. Currently almost no aid is spent on programs explicitly focused on reducing violent crime and attendant problems. While further research is needed to examine the effectiveness of violence reducing interventions, it appears likely that some interventions would constitute a very effective use of resources.

Violence against children is a human rights challenge. According to the UN Sustainable Development Goal 16.2, all violence against children should be eliminated. This paper discusses how violence against children can be defined and which forms it takes. Parental violence in the form of physical discipline is highly prevalent, particularly in low-income countries. This violence causes suffering, has serious health consequences and reduces human capital. This article estimates that 311 million children are subjected to severe forms of physical punishment, equivalent to 17.5 per cent of all children worldwide. In contrast to other forms of violence (e.g. civil wars and terrorism), ‘every day’ violence against children receives little attention in development research, despite the high prevalence rates and resulting adverse consequences for societal development. This special issue presents evidence from promising parenting interventions for violence reduction in low-income settings in Kenya, Liberia and Uganda.

Offering a framework for ethical assessment, this article draws attention to the ethical issues accompanying empirical research on security. Speaking to the various subfields and schools of broadly conceived applied security studies, we classify the many ethical issues specific to empirical research on security, conflict, and political violence into researcher-related problems, subject-related problems, and result-related problems. We evaluate the importance and variations of these issues and highlight potential mitigation pathways. This effort brings together an existing but fragmented literature and builds upon the authors’ own experiences in several subfields and schools of “hands-on” research on security and political violence. published

The international community uses a number of interventions to make and build peace. How effective are these interventions? What works and what does not? Some of the commonly advocated interventions have been assessed in large- n studies.This article provides an overview of the current knowledge and highlights the uncertainties. Although there is no evidence that development aid helps to prevent wars in general, aid stabilizes post-war situations. There are also a considerable number of studies suggesting that UN Peacekeeping Operations do indeed keep the peace. Although there are fewer studies, there is some emerging evidence that arms embargoes do restrict arms transfers to conflict zones and thus help to make conflicts less deadly. This suggests that internationally binding rules on arms transfers and the use of private military and security services are effective means of conflict management. On the other hand, the evidence arising from the analysis of mediation and sanctions is mixed. They are frequently used third-party interventions, often in conjuncture with other interventions. However, our knowledge about the optimal policy mix of economic, diplomatic and military interventions is still limited.

After briefly reviewing the new institutionalism, this article uses the history of political reform in Africa to test its key tenet: that power, if properly organised, is a productive resource. It does so by exploring the relationship between changes in political institutions and changes in economic performance, both at the macro- and the micro level. The evidence indicates that political reform (Granger) causes increases in GDP per capita in the African subset of global data. And, at the micro level, it demonstrates that changes in national political institutions in Africa strongly relate to changes in total factor productivity in agriculture. Copyright 2013 , Oxford University Press.

Previous studies of aid allocation have concluded that foreign aid is allocated not only according to development needs but also according to donor self-interest. We revisit this topic and allow for donor- as well as recipient-specific effects in our analysis. In addition to comments on the statistical significance of our results we assess the relative economic importance of recipient need, merit, and donor self-interest. Our results indicate that all bilateral donors allocate aid according to their self-interest and recipient need. However, most bilateral donors seem to place little importance on recipient merit. Less than 1% of the variance of aid is accounted for by merit, ceteris paribus. The UK and Japan are exceptions: they allocate more aid to countries with higher growth, higher democracy scores, and fewer human rights abuses.

Case studies as well as cross-country studies suggest that countries with an abundance of natural resources are more prone to violent conflict. This collection of articles analyzes the link between natural resources and civil war in a number of different ways. So far the literature falls broadly into two camps. First, in the economics literature the well-documented “resource curse” leads to low-income growth rates and low levels of income. These in turn constitute low opportunity costs for rebellion and make civil war more likely. On the other hand, political science literature concentrates on the link between natural resources and weak institutions. States with natural resources often rely on a system of patronage and do not develop a democratic system based on electoral competition, scrutiny and civil rights. Based on further empirical evidence in this volume we conclude with a brief overview of current policy initiatives.

Using global data for the period 1960-99, we model military expenditure. Neighbours' military spending and development aid are important determinants of military expenditure. An implication of the model is that there are regional arms races which are fuelled by aid. Potentially, aid is encouraging a 'regional public bad'. There may, however, be an offsetting public good effect if military spending deters rebellions. In a simultaneous equation model, we find no deterrence effect of spending on the risk of civil war. Hence, there appears to be no regional public good effect offsetting the public bad arising from a neighbourhood arms race.

We build a data set on financial and human capital flight for 48 countries for the period 1970-98 and analyse capital flight as a portfolio choice. Financial capital flight is measured as the stock of capital flight relative to domestically held private net wealth and human capital flight as the proportion of a country's educated population that is living outside the country. Our results suggest that the same economic factors influence human and financial portfolio decisions, namely the relative returns and the relative risks in the competing locations. We focus on the estimated model's implications for Africa, finding that the severe financial capital flight that Africa experienced until the late 1980s has started to be reversed. The factors that have accounted for this repatriation are probably the reduction in the parallel market premium and African indebtedness, the reduction in the incidence of civil war (a phenomenon true only of our sample countries, rather than a general African phenomenon) and the decline in real US interest rates. In contrast, we find that human capital flight is rapidly increasing, as the emigration of the educated is subject to much more powerful momentum effects than financial capital flight. Finally, we find that for both types of capital flight policy changes only affect outcomes with long lags, suggesting that Africa's human capital exodus will be an increasingly important problem.

Post-conflict situations face a high risk of reversion to conflict. We investigate the effect of military expenditure by the government during the first decade post-conflict on the risk of reversion. We contrast two theories as to the likely effects. In one, military spending deters conflict by reducing the prospects of rebel success. In the other it acts as a signal to the rebels of government intentions. In the signalling model, low military spending signals that the government intends to adhere to the terms of the peace settlement and so reduces the risk of renewed rebellion. We investigate the effects of post- conflict military spending on the risk of conflict, using our existing models of military expenditure and of conflict risk. We find that, consistent with the signalling model, high military spending post- conflict significantly increases the risk of renewed conflict. This effect of military spending is distinctive to post-conflict period, and becomes progressively more pronounced over the decade.

As poor policies are blamed for dismal economic outcomes in many African countries and institutions and governance have assumed greater importance in explaining policy making, this article overviews a set of papers appearing in the current volume on 'institutions, governance and economic development in Africa'. The following results emerge. First, while politically accountable governments can lead to improved economic outcomes, they are unlikely to adopt economically desirable policies that are unpopular with the populace. Unfortunately, such governments also tend to increase the risk of political disorder in Africa, which may in turn be growth-inhibiting. Thus, recent attempts by African countries to adopt more democratic governments may not lead to the expected improved growth and development outcomes unless successful attempts at minimising political disorder can be achieved. Second, the existence of ethnically based interest groups is likely to result in sub-optimal provision of public goods, which can be critical to the development process. Hence, the challenge of attenuating ethnic polarisation is a salient one. Third, as the Botswana case indicates, the ability to appropriately accommodate minority interests, coupled with the existence of external threats and natural resource endowments that foster the delineation of property rights, augers well for state building required for good governance, notwithstanding the existence of low population density. Copyright 2006, Oxford University Press.

Resource-rich countries have tended to be autocratic and also have tended to use their resource wealth badly. The neoconservative agenda of promoting democratization in resource-rich countries thus offers the hopeful prospect of a better use of their economic opportunities. This paper examines whether the effect of democracy on economic performance is distinctive in resource-rich societies. We show that a priori the sign of the effect is ambiguous: resource rents could either enhance or undermine the economic consequences of democracy. We therefore investigate the issue empirically. We first build a new data set on country-specific resource rents, annually for the period 1970-2001. Using a global panel data set we find that in developing countries the combination of high natural resource rents and open democratic systems has been growth-reducing. Checks and balances offset this adverse effect. Thus, resource-rich economies need a distinctive form of democracy with particularly strong checks and balances. Unfortunately this is rare: checks and balances are public goods and so are liable to be undersupplied in new democracies. Over time they are eroded by resource rents.

Civil war conflict is a core development issue. The existence of civil war can dramatically slow a country's development process, especially in low-income countries, which are more vulnerable to civil war conflict. When development succeeds, countries become safer; when development fails, countries experience greater risk of being caught in a conflict trap. Ultimately, civil war is a failure of development. This book identifies the dire consequences that civil war has on the development process and offers three main findings: (i) civil wars have adverse ripple effects, which are often not taken into account by those determine when to start or end a war; (ii) some countries are more likely than others to experience civil war conflict and therefore the risks of civil war differ considerable according to a country's characteristics including its economic stability. Finally, this book explores viable international measures that can be taken to reduce the global incidence of civil war and propose a practical agenda for action. This book will also be of great interest to researchers, academics, and anyone interested in conflict and post-conflict resolution.

Using global data for the period 1960-99, Collier and Hoeffler estimate neighborhood arms races. They find that the level of military expenditure is strongly influenced by the expenditure of neighbors. The authors estimate an "arms race multiplier," finding that an initial exogenous increase in military expenditure by one country is more than doubled in both the originating country and its neighbor. An implication is that military expenditure is, to an extent, a "regional public bad." Potentially, there is an offsetting public good effect if rebellions are deterred by military expenditure. However, instrumenting for military expenditure, the authors find no deterrence effect of military spending on the risk of internal conflict. So there appears to be no regional public good effect offsetting the public bad arising from a neighborhood arms race. This paper - a product of the Development Research Group - is part of a larger effort in the group to study the economics of conflict.

Civil war is the most prevalent form of large-scale violence and is massively destructive to life, society, and the economy. The prevention of civil war is therefore a key priority for international attention. We present an empirical analysis of what makes countries prone to civil war. Using a global panel data set we examine different determinants of civil war for the period 1960-2004. We find little evidence that motivation can account for civil war risk but we suggest that there is evidence to support our feasibility hypothesis: that where a rebellion is financially and militarily feasible it will occur. Copyright 2009 , Oxford University Press.

Africa experienced a wave of democratization over the past 20 years and this increase in democracy, we find, positively and significantly affects income per capita. Our dynamic panel data results suggest that countries only slowly converge to their long-run income values as predicted by current democracy levels, however. African countries may therefore be currently too democratic relative to their income levels. In keeping with this possibility, a significant number of countries are experiencing political ‘back sliding’: elections are won by the use of illicit tactics, term limits on political leaders have been overturned and there have been unconstitutional seizures of power.

Countries emerging from civil war attract both aid and policy advice. This paper provides the first systematic empirical analysis of aid and policy reform in the post-conflict growth process. It is based on a comprehensive data set of large civil wars and covers 27 countries that were in their first decade of post-conflict economic recovery during the 1990s. Collier and Hoeffler first investigate whether the absorptive capacity for aid is systematically different in post-conflict countries. They find that during the first three post-conflict years, absorptive capacity is no greater than normal, but that in the rest of the first decade it is approximately double its normal level. So ideally, aid should phase in during the decade. Historically, aid has not, on average, been higher in post-conflict societies, and it has tended to taper out over the course of the decade. The authors then investigate whether the contribution of policy to growth is systematically different in post-conflict countries, and in particular, whether particular components of policy are differentially important. For this they use the World Bank policy rating database. The authors find that growth is more sensitive to policy in post-conflict societies. Comparing the efficacy of different policies, they find that social policies are differentially important relative to macroeconomic policies. However, historically, this does not appear to have been how policy reform has been prioritized in post-conflict societies. This paper--a product of the Development Research Group--is part of a larger effort in the group to study the economics of conflict.

An econometric model of civil war is applied to the analysis of conflict in sub-Saharan Africa. Results show that Africa has had a similar incidence of civil conflict to other developing regions, and, with minor exceptions, its conflicts are consistent with the global pattern of behavior. However, the structure of risk differs considerably from other regions. Africa's economic characteristics have made it more vulnerable to conflict, but this has been offset by social characteristics that make its societies atypically safe. The contrasting trends of conflict are analyzed: rising in Africa and declining in other regions. Results show that these trends are predicted by the model. Africa's rising trend of conflict is due to its atypically poor economic performance.

We analyze theoretically and empirically the effects of economic policy and the receipt of foreign aid on the risk of civil war. We find that aid and policy do not have direct effects upon conflict risk. However, both directly affect the growth rate and the extent of dependence upon primary commodity exports, and these in turn affect the risk of conflict. Simulating the effect of a package of policy reform and increased aid on the average aid recipient country, we find that after five years the risk of conflict is reduced by nearly 30%.

In the empirical growth literature both investment and openness to international trade have been identified as important determinants of growth. These relationships appear to be robust in a number of specifications. However, Sachs and Warner claim that openness is such an important determinant of investment that the coefficient on investment will be insignificant in growth regressions, which already account for openness. I re‐examine this result and can only support it if I use their model specification and estimation method. I suggest that their ordinary least squares estimation suffers from both endogeneity and omitted variable bias. Using panel data analysis, I show that ignoring unobserved country‐specific effects and endogeneity problems cause investment to be insignificant. Estimating the model with the Blundell and Bond system general method of moments estimator, which allows me to address the omitted variable as well as the endogeneity bias, I find that investment is significant in the Sachs–Warner model despite controlling for openness. Thus, my regressions confirm that openness has a significant, positive effect on income. However, this variable is not so important that it drives investment out of the model. My re‐examination of the Sachs–Warner model shows that results from single cross‐country growth regressions can be misleading when unobserved country‐specific effects and endogeneity problems are ignored.

The authors investigate whether civil wars have economic causes. The model is based on utility theory, rebels will conduct a civil war if the perceived benefits outweigh the costs of rebellion. Using probit and tobit models, the propositions are tested empirically. Four variables, initial income, ethno-linguistic fractionalization, the amount of natural resources, and initial population size are significant and strong determinants of the duration and the probability of civil wars. One important finding is that the relationship between civil wars and ethnic diversity is nonmonotonic; highly fractionalized societies have no greater risk of experiencing a civil war than homogenous ones.