Conflict and development
2020: Political Violence, Adverse Shocks and Child Malnutrition: Evidence from Andhra Pradesh, India, Economics and Human Biology, vol. 39 (with P. Justino and C. Mueller).
We analyze the combined effect of political violence and adverse climatic and health shocks on child nutrition using longitudinal data from Andhra Pradesh, India. The paper shows three key results using two-stage least square (2SLS) models: (i) the presence of political violence reduces the mean height-for-age z-scores of children by between 0.4 and 0.9 standard deviations and reduces the mean weight-for-age -scores of children by between 0.3 and 0.6 standard deviations; (ii) political violence generates such a large negative effect on the long-term nutrition of children (measured by height-for-age -scores) through a reduction of the ability of households to cope with drought and illness; and (iii) drought and illness have an adverse effect on child nutrition in Andhra Pradesh only in violence-affected communities. The 2SLS results are robust to a wide range of robustness tests. Potential mechanisms explaining the strong joint welfare effect of conflict and adverse shocks are the failure of economic coping strategies in areas of violence and restricted access to public goods and services.
2020: Riots and Social Capital in Urban India, UNU-WIDER Working Paper 42/2020 (with A. Aghajanian and P. Justino)
This paper explores the relationship between household exposure to riots and social capital in urban India using a panel dataset collected by the authors in the state of Maharashtra. The analysis applies a random-effect model with lagged covariates to estimate the exogenous effect of riots on social capital. Households living in neighbourhoods prone to riots are more likely to invest in bridging social capital by joining community organizations but reduce face-to -face contact with neighbours. These effects are driven largely by levels of neighbourhood social fragmentation in riot-prone neighbourhoods. There, the salience of social identity is also reduced as individuals attempt to reach out across social divisions. We interpret these results as indicating that households instrumentally use bridging forms of social capital as an insurance against potential future communal violence in socially fragmented contexts where conflicting social groups live alongside each other
2019: School Feeding or General Food Distribution? Quasi-Experimental Evidence on the Educational Impacts of Emergency Food Assistance during Conflict in Mali, Journal of Development Studies, vol. 55(Issue sup. 1), pp. 7-28 (with E. Aurino, A. Gelli and A.S. Diallo).
Abstract: This study relies on a unique precrisis baseline and five-year follow-up to investigate the effects of emergency school feeding and generalised food distribution (GFD) on children’s schooling during conflict in Mali. It estimates programme impact on child enrolment, absenteeism, and attainment by using a difference in differences weighted estimator. School feeding led to increases in enrolment by 10 percentage points and to around an additional half-year of completed schooling. Attendance among boys in households receiving GFD, however, declined by about 20 per cent relative to the comparison group. Disaggregating by conflict intensity showed that receipt of any food assistance led to a rise in enrolment mostly in high-intensity conflict areas and that the negative effects of GFD on attendance were also concentrated in the most affected areas. School feeding mostly raised attainment among children in areas not in the immediate vicinity of conflict. Programme receipt triggered adjustments in child labour. School feeding led to lower participation and time spent in work among girls, while GFD raised children’s labour, particularly among boys. The educational implications of food assistance should be considered in planning humanitarian responses to bridge the gap between emergency assistance and development by promoting children’s education.
2019: Domestic Violence and Humanitarian Crises: Evidence from the 2014 Israeli Military Operation in Gaza, Violence Against Women, vol. 25(12), pp. 1391-1416 (with C. Mueller).
Using qualitative data from 21 group discussions and unique survey data from a representative cross-section of 439 women in the Gaza Strip, we discuss domestic violence (DV) risk factors at different levels of the ecological model in relation to the Israeli military operation “Protective Edge” in 2014. We combine our survey data with secondary data on infrastructure destruction across Gaza’s neighbourhoods, and use propensity score matching techniques to show that the impact of the military operation on DV manifests itself already at relatively low-levels of destruction. Through the impact on displacement, the ability of married women to contribute to household decision-making and their social support network are reduced - both factors associated with lower levels of DV.
2019: The impact of food assistance on food insecure populations during conflict: Evidence from a quasi-experiment in Mali, World Development, vol. 119. pp. 185-202 (with A. Gelli, L. Bliznashka, A.S. Diallo, M. Sacko, A. Assima, E.H. Siegel, E. Aurino and E. Masset).
Mali, a vast landlocked country at the heart of West Africa in the Sahel region, is one of the least developed and most food insecure countries in the world. Mali suffered from a series of political, constitutional and military crises since January 2012, including the loss of government control of northern territories from April 2012 until January 2013. A range of humanitarian aid interventions were scaled up in response to these complex crises. In this study, we exploit data from a unique pre-crisis baseline to evaluate the impact of humanitarian aid on the food security of rural populations. We design a quasi-experimental study based on two survey rounds, five years apart, in the Mopti region in Northern Mali. Data was collected from 66 communities randomly selected from within food-insecure districts. Study outcomes include household expenditures and food consumption and a proxy for child nutritional status (height measurements). We estimate program impact by combining propensity score matching and difference-in-difference. Food assistance was found to increase household non-food and food expenditures and micro-nutrient availability. Disaggregating by degree of conflict exposure showed that the effects on children’s height and caloric and micro-nutrient consumption were mostly concentrated in areas not in the immediate vicinity of the conflict, unlike the increase in food expenditures that were driven by households located in close proximity to armed groups. The effects were also concentrated on households receiving at least two forms of food assistance. In villages where armed groups were present, food assistance improved household zinc consumption and also appeared to support food expenditures. Food transfers are thus found to exert a protective effect among food insecure population in conflict context.
2019: “A Micro-Level Perspective on the Relationships between Presence of Armed Groups, Armed Conflict Violence, and Access to Aid in Mopti, Mali”, IFPRI Discussion Paper 01844 (with A. Gelli and E. Masset).
This paper exploits a unique panel dataset of households in Mopti whose baseline was collected in January 2012, just prior to the outset of the civil war in Mali. The follow-up survey was implemented in January 2017, in the midst of a rapidly intensifying armed conflict in the region. This paper addresses three research questions: (i) which pre-crisis characteristics of villages best explain the subsequent local presence of armed groups and local intensity of conflict-related violence? (ii) How the presence of armed groups and conflict-related violence are related to each other, and how they manifest themselves in the lives of communities? and (iii) what role the presence of armed groups and conflict-related violence play in the geographic allocation of aid? Answering these questions help us shed light on the determinants of vulnerability to conflict, on processes of armed conflict and on the relationships between aid and conflict.
2019: “Impact of Conflict on Agriculture in Mali”, IFPRI Discussion Paper 01843 (with A. Gelli, E. Masset and A.S. Diallo)
Our paper aims to investigating the impact of conflict on population displacement, agricultural production and agricultural assets, and the mitigating effect of food aid. The paper is structured in the following way. In the next section we provide a description of the survey data used in the analysis. Section 3 describes the interplay of conflict and emergency aid in the area. Section 4 analyses the impact of conflict on agriculture, while section 5 investigates to what extent emergency aid mitigated the negative impact of conflict on agriculture. Section 6 discusses the limitations of the study and suggests some potential future lines of research
2017: Gendered Experience of Interpersonal Violence in Urban and Rural Spaces: The Case of Ghana, MPRA Paper 79533.
This paper exploits unique quantitative data from Ghana to investigate gendered experiences of inter-personal domestic and non-domestic violence in urban and rural areas. Urban areas are charac- terised by lower levels of domestic violence against women but higher levels of non-domestic violence against men than rural areas. We conduct Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition analyses to identify the sources of these differences. Urban areas reduce violence through higher welfare, education and em- ployment outcomes, and lower alcohol consumption and polygamy prevalence than in rural areas. But more people living alone and wider insecurity in urban environments have the opposite effect on domestic and non-domestic violence.
2014: Households amidst urban riots: The economic consequences of civil violence in India, Journal of Conflict Resolution, vol. 58(8), pp: 1445-1473 (with J. Gupte and P. Justino).
The objective of this paper is to uncover the determinants of riot victimization in India. The analysis is based on a unique survey collected by the authors in March-May 2010 in Maharashtra. We adopt a multilevel framework that allows neighborhood and district effects to randomly influence household victimization. The main results are that households that (i) are economically vulnerable, (ii) live in the vicinity of a crime-prone area, and (iii) are not able to rely on community support are considerably more prone to suffer from riots than other households. All else equal, income per capita increases victimization, presumably through an opportunity cost mechanism. We find further that relatively affluent neighborhoods and those characterized by large caste fragmentation are more riot-prone than disfranchised and homogeneous ones. Victimization is more common in neighborhoods with weaker social interactions, but some evidence suggests that weak social interactions may also be a consequence of rioting.
Decentralization, institutions and ethnic conflict
2018: The economics of secession: a review of legal, theoretical, and empirical aspects, Swiss Journal of Economics and Statistics, vol. 154(19) (with T. Madies, G. Rota-Graziosi and C. Trepier).
The aim of this paper is to present a review of the legal, theoretical, and empirical aspects of secessions from an economic perspective. This survey provides interesting insights into recent events such as the Brexit and the threat of secession made for instance by Scotland and Catalonia. International law does not grant a general right to secede, nor does it forbid secession. Furthermore, there are several modalities of secessions, which turn out to be important for new states that want to get an international recognition. For its part, the economic theory shows that the decision for a region to remain in a country (or a union) or to secede eventually results from a trade-off between the benefits of being part of a large country, on the one hand, and the costs often associated to more heterogeneity, on the other hand. The latter are generally more important for those regions which are “far away” from the central (federal) government. Empirical literature confirms the importance of these trade-offs and shows that decentralization may be effective to accommodate secessionist conflicts only if certain conditions are fulfilled.
2016: Decentralisation, Regional Autonomy and Ethnic Civil Wars: A Dynamic Panel Data Analysis, 1950-2010, MPRA Paper 72750.
This paper empirically revisits the relationships between decentralisation, regional autonomy and ethnic civil war. On the one hand, decentralisation and autonomy may allow ethnic minorities to directly control their own affairs or to better hold regional rulers to account. On the other hand, decentralisation and autonomy in multi-ethnic countries may foster centrifugal forces and bestow legitimacy and resources to secessionist groups. Current evidence from cross-country or cross-ethnic group econometric studies are limited by crude operationalisation of decentralisation and often questionable treatment of endogeneity. The paper makes three key contributions: i) it builds a new dataset bringing together up-to-date and cutting edge data on decentralisation and autonomy (RAI) and ethnic group violence (EPR), thereby providing new insights on groups exposure to decentralisation in 81 countries between 1945 and 2010; ii) it tests how various facets of decentralisation (autonomy, self-rule, shared-rule, political decentralisation) relate to ethnic violence; and iii) it exploits dynamic panel data techniques, namely the difference-GMM estimator, to account for reverse causality and unobserved heterogeneity biases. The validity and strength of the estimator are explicitly established. I find that regional autonomy - even when decentralisation is otherwise limited - strongly reduces the incidence of ethnic civil wars. The conflict-mitigating effect of autonomy is maximal when regional governments command substantial powers in terms of policy-setting and when political decentralisation is strong. Political decentralisation is also found to be a strong and consistent factor of ethnic peace in the absence of regional autonomy. In contrast, granting regional governments wide-ranging authorities on policy and fiscal matters does not reduce the incidence of large-scale ethnic conflict on its own. Granting autonomy to regional governments which have no substantial powers of self-rule is weakly correlated with higher chances of onset of civil wars but a combination of autonomy and above-median self-rule and political decentralisation strongly reduces such a likelihood. Regional autonomy appears to be the only effective strategy to stop existing civil wars.
2016: Is Regional Autonomy a Solution to Ethnic Conflict? Some Lessons from a Dynamic Analysis, Peace Economics, Peace Science, and Public Policy, vol. 23(1), pp: 449-460.
Does granting regional autonomy to concentrated minorities appease their demand for sovereignty or instead motivate and enable them to engage in secessionist conflicts? To answer this question is difficult as moves towards federalism and decentralization are themselves the results of strategic interactions between the state and the minorities. In this note, I intend to shed some light on this question by looking at how ethnic civil wars and autonomy are dynamically linked. This shows that for locally dominant groups, the risk of war monotonically decreases in the years leading to and following autonomy. For groups that are a minority locally, however, the risk of war sharply increases in the lead-up to autonomy, and quickly falls afterwards, suggesting strategic behavior.
2008: Fiscal decentralisation, institutional quality and ethnic conflict: A panel data analysis, 1985–2001, Conflict, Security & Development, vol. 8(4), pp: 491-514.
Fiscal decentralisation is increasing throughout the world, especially in developing countries where it is argued to foster good governance and delivery of public goods. Fiscal decentralisation is also widely promoted as an institutional device to manage ethnic conflict. Proponents of fiscal decentralisation claim that it helps accommodate ethnic minorities by granting them considerable policy-making authority. However, the empirical literature on ethnic conflict has mainly focused on federalism and political decentralisation while the few studies that have included fiscal decentralisation have produced mixed results. In this paper, I test the effect of fiscal decentralisation on ethnic conflict while emphasising state capacities as a crucial mediating variable. I assume that fiscal decentralisation is unlikely to produce any effect in countries characterised by low state capacities and weak institutions. The rationale is threefold. (i) State capacities are usually lower at the local level than at the central level; yet implementing fiscal decentralisation requires that subunits are endowed with sufficient bureaucratic and technical competences. (ii) Devolution of policy-making authority to lower tiers of governments is usually assumed more genuine in countries characterised by good governance. (iii) When state capacities are weak, ethnic groups may be tempted to claim more than fiscal decentralisation and seek independence. I assume also that minorities that are the most ethnically distant from the rest of the population are those that should benefit most from fiscal decentralisation. The system GMM estimations confirm that ethnically distinctive minorities benefit more from fiscal decentralisation. Regarding state capacities, findings are radically different with respect to the indicators that are used. Fiscal decentralisation is found to reduce the likelihood of conflict if GDP per capita is considered as a proxy for state capacity, while opposite results emerge when governance indices are used.
2012: Institutions, mobilization and rebellion in post-colonial societies, HiCN Working Paper No. 133 (with J-L. Arcand).
We revisit the simultaneous equations model of rebellion, mobilization, grievances and repression proposed by Gurr and Moore (1997). Our main contribution is to clarify and improve on the underlying identification strategy by resorting to the well-known colonization instruments recently constructed by Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson (2001, 2002). We also emphasize the role played by the institutional environment. Instrumental variables estimates for post-colonial societies reveal that the strength of the state, as captured empirically by an index of bureaucratic quality, exerts a strong preventive effect on rebellion. On the other hand, working institutions also influence the likelihood of rebellion indirectly, through mobilization. Our estimates suggest that this indirect effect increases rebellion. As such, the total net effect of better institutions on rebellion is ambiguous.
2012: Preference-Matching and Violent Ethnic Conflict: The Heterogeneous Impact of Fiscal Decentralisation on Local Majorities and Local Minorities. CERDI Working Paper No. 2007.05.
Does fiscal decentralization detract from ethnic violence by improving the match between minorities' desired and actual policies? This paper re-examines this question by introducing three critiques of the argument. Firstly, ethnic groups' preferences depend on patterns of spatial segregation. Secondly, centralized systems can accommodate region-specific policies. Thirdly, decentralization empowers local majorities and minorities differently. Predictions based on a refined version of the argument are proposed and tested with a worldwide panel dataset of ethnic groups. Results are consistent with decentralization acting through a preference-matching mechanism: decentralization is desirable for local majorities, fuels rebellion amongst local minorities and reduces communal violence.
2008: The Making of a (vice-) President: Party Politics, Ethnicity, Village Loyalty and Community-Driven Development, CERDI Working Paper No. 2006.33 (with J-L, Arcand and L. Bassole).
African politics are often said to be dominated by ethnic divides, with the ensuing policies implemented by leaders being based almost exclusively on their ethnic power base. In this paper, we demonstrate that the village of origin of democratically-elected leaders matters for the attribution of development projects in the context of one of the largest Community-Driven Development (CDD) programs in Senegal. After showing that leadership matters, we consider those factors that determine who is elected president (and vice-president) of a Conseil rural, the smallest administrative unit in Senegal. We also consider the link between power in the Conseil rural and that in the Conseil de Concertation et de Gestion (CCG), an assembly coopted by the Conseil rural president that is typical of local institutions set up in the context of CDD programs, and which is responsible for the participative identification of the development projects that constitute the priorities of villagers. Using a unique dataset, we show that ethnicity plays almost no role in determining who becomes president (or vice-president) of a Conseil rural, while party politics, age, political experience, village loyalty, and educational and professional qualifications do. Our findings highlight the crucial importance, in terms of development policy, of the local political institutions that are often reinforced or created alongside CDD programs.