the politicization of crime electoral competition and the supply of maritime piracy in indonesia electoral competition in weak institutional settings has been shown to increase criminal violence in particular homicides electoral competitiveness by virtue of threatening the ability of incumbents to maintain informal corruption agreements with criminal networks is argued to increase crime because of violent competition among criminal groups over future influence we link elections to maritime piracy a form of criminal behavior that has increased substantially since the end of the cold war and for which cross national temporally and spatially disaggregated data are available we argue that electoral competition reinforces piracy because political changes threaten to disrupt collusive agreements between pirates and government authorities anticipating a disruption of criminal activity pirates elevate their attack rates before political changes undermine these agreements this disruption effect suggests that jurisdictions holding competitive electoral contests should experience more maritime piracy we test our hypothesis on electoral competitiveness and piracy with subnational data for the 1999 and 2004 elections in indonesia our results show that piracy escalates in proximity to highly competitive electoral districts

estimating the impact of currency unions on trade solving the glick and rose puzzle does leaving a currency union reduce international trade this paper uses a historical approach to re examine the puzzling large apparent impact of currency unions on trade i find that the early time series estimates were driven by the gradual decaying of colonial trade ties and other major geopolitical factors including warfare communist takeovers and ethnic cleansing episodes my methodology which carries lessons for other uses of gravity equations in policy analysis yields point estimates of currency unions on trade that are not statistically distinct from zero

the crowding hypothesis and comparable worth although women s pay and occupational distribution have improved during the past few years it is still true that women earn considerably less than men and that their occupational distribution is substantially different because progress has been slow toward equality in the labor market some have called for a comparable worth policy proponents of this approach argue that occupational segregation contributes to the earnings disparity between women and men one theoretical justification for this position is the crowding hypothesis this paper first explains this theory and presents a method used to test its principal hypothesis it then describes an extension of this design for estimating the phenomenon that comparable worth policies address empirical studies conducted in this area are viewed and new findings are presented finally limitations of this analysis are discussed i introduction

fixed currency regimes and the time pattern of trade effects abstract this paper assesses duration specific treatment effects of fixed currency regimes on bilateral trade along a duration path of up to 25 years we find that country pairs with fixed exchange rate regimes trade more but only after about 8 years

occupational self selection a human capital approach to sex differences in occupational structure a rich and diverse literature exists concerning the distribution of labor incomes one approach namely that of human capital concentrates on lifetime accumulation paths of earnings capacity units human capital individual variations in human capital imply differences in earnings power thereby yielding strong implications concerning earnings distribution within a population despite its explanatory power the human capital model has been widely criticized one criticism centers on its inability to obtain inferences concerning occupational distribution the purpose of this paper is to alleviate at least some such criticism by applying the hedonic price approach so as to embed occupational choice into the human capital framework the significance is that neoclassical economic theory can be used to obtain implications concerning the determinants of occupational structure excerpt

the indian gaming regulatory act and its effects on american indian economic development the indian gaming regulatory act igra passed by the us congress in 1988 was a watershed in the history of policymaking directed toward reservation resident american indians igra set the stage for tribal government owned gaming facilities it also shaped how this new industry would develop and how tribal governments would invest gaming revenues since then indian gaming has approached commercial state licensed gaming in total revenues gaming operations have had a far reaching and transformative effect on american indian reservations and their economies specifically indian gaming has allowed marked improvements in several important dimensions of reservation life for the first time some tribal governments have moved to fiscal independence native nations have invested gaming revenues in their economies and societies often with dramatic effect

opposition parties and the urban poor in african democracies africa s urban poor increasingly represent a key constituency for electoral mobilization opposition parties which are pivotal for democratic consolidation have nevertheless exhibited disparate success at obtaining votes from this constituency to explain why this study focuses on the case of zambia and draws on interviews with political elites as well as a survey of informal sector workers in lusaka instead of vote buying ethnic alignments or economic voting these data show that the urban poor s voting decisions are related to the strategies used by political parties to incorporate them into the political arena opposition parties that employ populist strategies are more likely to win support from the urban poor than parties reliant on alternative modes of mobilization the advantages of a populist strategy include greater differentiation from the myriad of purely personalistic parties in africa and greater congruence with the policy priorities of the urban poor including service delivery and jobs

why do corrupt governments maintain public support this article addresses an issue often neglected by the current literature on political corruption why do citizens support corrupt governments the authors argue that people in countries where gove

honey the currency union effect on trade hasn t blown up as the value of real bilateral trade between countries i and j at time t cu is a dummy variable which is unity if i and j sharethe same currency at time t z is a vector of controls given by an augmentedgravity model c are the associate nuisance coefficients and is a hopefully well behaved residual my chief finding was that was large and robust mypoint estimate was 1 2 implying that currency union is associated with atripling since exp 1 2 3 of trade in his paper in this issue volker nitsch provides three pieces of value added first he finds and corrects a number of data errors in my original data set second he shows that adding extra controls to my empirical setup disaggregating bycurrency unions and adjusting for missing data affects the results he concludesthat the effect of currency union on trade is smaller than my original estimates has not been reliably estimated and may be zero

de facto exchange rate arrangement tightness and bilateral trade flows abstract this paper estimates the effect of switching into and out of 14 different modes of exchange rate arrangements on bilateral exports between 1948 and 2001 in the world economy increasing the exchange rate arrangement tightness by one degree in the classification of reinhart and rogoff reinhart carmen m and kenneth s rogoff 2004 the modern history of exchange rate arrangements a reinterpretation quarterly journal of economics 119 1 48 increases bilateral trade flows by about 2 4 as compared to their initial level

does commercialization undermine the benefits of decentralization for local services provision evidence from mexico s urban water and sanitation sector summary decentralization has been promoted as a means to better reflect citizen preferences and improve local services many developing countries decentralized and promoted neoliberal policies such as commercialization simultaneously leaving mayors with the responsibility of improving public services through self financing reforms this study evaluates experiences in three mexican cities to assess whether decentralization and commercialization practices have resulted in improved water and sanitation services it finds that commercialization has increased social conflict surrounding urban services provision and that local institutional constraints further undermine mayor s ability to adopt politically contentious policies the result has been stalled and uneven service improvements

public participation and poverty alleviation the experience of reform communists in india s west bengal abstract public participation is essential to making poverty alleviation programs responsive to the needs of the poor but it requires a political process that adequately represents their interests yet as long as the poor remain poor they are disadvantaged in securing equitable representation this article highlights the problems stemming from this paradox of participation it shows how implementing poverty alleviation programs through elected governing councils has simultaneously made policy more responsive to the poor while permitting the organizational interests of the ruling communist party to distort implementation the article highlights the importance of political competition among parties and nongovernment organizations for maximizing responsiveness to the poor

currency unions and trade the effect is large the impact of a common currency on trade can be grossly mismeasured if countries that belong to currency unions are systematically different from those that do not and if the relationship between trade and its observable determinants is complex i argue that such complications are plausible and likely to distort the empirical results of a recent economic policy paper by andrew rose issue 30 2000 pp 7 45 using techniques designed to be robust in this situation i find that the effects of common currency on international trade are considerably less dramatic and much less precisely estimated copyright cepr ces msh 2001

trade integration and business cycle convergence is the relation robust across time and space in this paper we investigate the relationship between trade intensity and the business cycle correlation using a panel data set taken from 24 countries over the period 1959 2003 most previous studies did not account for the possibility that the business cycle correlation may be influenced by unobservable country pair specific effects our estimates using both fixed and random effects methodologies suggest that trade intensity and the business cycle correlation are positively related to one another however detailed investigation shows that this relationship exists mainly for the european countries

do currency unions deliver more economic integration than fixed exchange rates evidence from the franc zone and the eccu in this article we develop a model to identify determinants of macroeconomic integration in the african franc zone and in dollar pegging caribbean countries including members of the east caribbean currency union these two groups of countries each comprise states using several different local currencies on the one hand the uemoa cfa franc and the cemac cfa franc both pegged to the euro on the other the eccu dollar and other national dollar pegged currencies the purpose of the analysis is to distinguish the effect of monetary union on macroeconomic integration from the effect of pegging to a common oecd currency

complementing emu rethinking cohesion policy under emu the less competitive regions of the eu usually assumed to be peripheral have been widely expected to lose ground yet it is the core of the eu that so far has appeared to have suffered from the advent of the euro this paper looks at the processes behind regional divergence in the eu and presents evidence on recent and prospective trends as emu is consolidated bearing in mind that the imminent enlargement of the eu will radically change the political economy of the eu s efforts to assure cohesion policy issues are then discussed looking forward to the next renegotiation of the structural funds it is argued that difficult decisions have to be taken about the extent and character of eu policy the option of an open method of coordination for cohesion policy is put forward as a means of resolving some of the hard choices

rentierism energy and economic growth the case of algeria and egypt 1965 2010 abstract the algerian economy is an example of a high level of rentierism while the egyptian economy shows a low moderate level of rentierism the ardl bounds test approach was used upon annual time series data from 1965 to 2010 the results suggest cointegration for both countries bi causality between energy consumption and growth in the long run was found for algeria there is a reversed negative energy growth nexus adding a new relationship to the traditional four causal hypotheses on the energy growth nexus for egypt we found positive elasticity both of oil price and energy which is in line with the mainstream

social capital as a product of class mobilization and state intervention industrial workers in kerala india abstract this paper argues that state intervention and class mobilization in the state of kerala india have produced two forms of social capital kerala s high level of social development and successful redistributive reforms are a direct result of mutually reinforcing interactions between a programmatic labor movement and a democratic state this synergy between state and labor has also created the institutional forms and political processes required for negotiating the class compromises through which redistribution and growth can be reconciled these dynamics are explored through a close examination of both the organized factory sector and the unorganized informal sector

a cross national comparison of the gender gap in income this article examines national labor market samples from two dualist countries the united states and canada and two corporatist countries norway and sweden labor market location is less powerful in predicting income in norway and sweden where they have more inclusive employment policies in sweden though the labor market variables are more important in explaining the income gap family effects marital status and number of children are weak everywhere but especially in scandinavia nevertheless because it is encouraged by policies designed to integrate employment and family part time paid work has a major effect on the gender gap in income in norway and sweden women however pay more of a penalty than men for part time employment in north america

black white wage inequality employment rates and incarceration the observed gap in average wages between black men and white men inadequately reflects the relative economic standing of blacks who suffer from a high rate of joblessness the authors estimate the black white gap in hourly wages from 1980 to 1999 adjusting for the sample selection effect of labor inactivity among working age men in 1999 accounting for labor inactivity including prison and jail incarceration leads to an increase of 7 20 in the black white wage gap adjusting for sample selectivity among men ages 22 30 in 1999 increases the wage gap by as much as 58 increasing selection bias which can be attributed to incarceration and conventional joblessness explains about two thirds of the rise in black relative wages among young men between 1985 and 1998 apparent improvement in the economic position of young black men is thus largely an artifact of rising joblessness fueled by the growth in incarceration during the 1990s

mission improbable does petroleum related aid address the resource curse petroleum related aid programmes and projects are a key part of donor activities in oil rich developing countries this paper critically assesses petroleum related aid activities using the norwegian oil for development programme as a main case recent research suggests that institutions or governance are essential in averting a resource curse while governance issues are beginning to receive more attention in these types of programmes they still form a minor part of programme activities the narrow sector focus that characterizes petroleum related aid makes it unlikely that it will produce the higher order institutional changes needed to lift the resource curse petroleum related aid activities address the issue of corruption only to a limited extent given the commercial and political interests of donor countries questions about the integrity and credibility of these types of programmes can be raised

resource curse an analysis of causes experiences and possible ways forward abstract higher prices for oil gas and mineral resources have again raised questions about how exporting countries can counter the challenges of resource curse international experience managing the risks of resource curse has varied summarising the continuing discussion on meeting the challenges of the resource curse this paper addresses four questions what are the positive and negative effects of high oil gas and mineral prices on exporters what have been the experiences with managing natural resource revenues can good institutions ensure that natural resource revenues have a positive impact on development and what is the direction for the way forward we argue that the current emphasis on institutions as a potential solution has largely ignored under what conditions institutions are formed and changed

one money one market the effect of common currencies on trade currency unions their dramatic effect on international trade a gravity model is used to assess the separate effects of exchange rate volatility and currency unions on international trade the panel data bilateral observations for five years during 1970 90 covering 186 countries includes 300 observations in which both countries use the same currency i find a large positive effect of a currency union on international trade and a small negative effect of exchange rate volatility even after controlling for a host of features including the endogenous nature of the exchange rate regime these effects statistically significant imply that two countries sharing the same currency trade three times as much as they would with different currencies currency unions like the european emu may thus lead to a large increase in international trade with all that that entails andrew rose

explaining occupational sex segregation and wages findings from a model with fixed effects does segregation arise because female occupations have financial advantages for women planning to spend some time as homemakers as human capital theorists claim do male occupations have more onerous working conditions that explain their higher earnings as the neoclassical notion of compensating differentials suggests or do female occupations have low wages that are depressed by the sort of discrimination at issue in comparable worth as sociologists have argued to answer these questions the authors use a model with fixed effects to predict the earnings of young men and women from a pooled cross section time series of the national longitudinal survey analyses are undertaken for both blacks and whites a fixed effects model is useful for answering these questions because it corrects for the selection bias that results from the tendency of persons who differ on stable characteristics that are unmeasured but affect earnings to select themselves into different occupations the authors find little evidence that female occupations provide either low penalties for intermittent employment at high starting wages the advantages human capital theorists have argued them to have rather there is evidence of pay discrimination against men and women in predominantly female occupations implications for economic and sociological theories of labor markets are discussed authors

if diversification is good why don t countries diversify more the political economy of diversification in resource rich countries abstract for resource rich countries diversification is claimed to represent a strategy for reducing resource curse problems this however depends on whether diversification has a positive effect on the country s institutions while there is a lot of evidence that exports of oil have a negative impact on institutions we know much less about the extent to which diversification leads to better institutions this article applies recent political economy theory to the phenomenon of diversification theoretical arguments suggest that it is the pattern of industrial activity rather than diversification per se which affects institutions like democracy in other words not all forms of diversification lead to better institutions furthermore where diversification has a positive impact on institutions diversification may be difficult to attain when it threatens the power base of the ruling elite a possible implication of these arguments is that policies for diversification should focus on international regulation affecting elite incentives rather than domestic industrial policy

do conditional cash transfers affect electoral behavior evidence from a randomized experiment in mexico this article reexamines the argument that targeted programs increase pro incumbent voting by persuading beneficiaries to cast ballots against their first partisan choice the evidence comes from the randomized component of progresa the pioneering mexican conditional cash transfer cct program experimental data show that early enrollment in the program led to substantive increases in voter turnout and in the incumbent s vote share in the 2000 presidential election the experiment also reveals that opposition parties vote shares were unaffected by the program thus the electoral bonus generated by ccts may be best explained by a mobilizing rather than persuasive mechanism these findings are difficult to reconcile with the notion that the electoral effects of ccts are a result of prospective concerns triggered by threats of program discontinuation or endogenous program enrollment instead the evidence in this article suggests that ccts mobilizing effects are compatible with programmatic politics

the effects of governance modes on the energy matrix of andean countries this article addresses the consequences of different modes of energy governance on the energy matrix energy governance is understood as a regulation system of the energy related interplays between the state the society and the economy the energy matrix is a useful instrument for comparative policy analysis since it informs us about production and consumption trends by sources and sectors our central argument is that energy governance follows two different patterns one hierarchical and the other cooperative that are not necessarily determined by the initial factors allocation and produce different effects on the energy matrix hierarchical governance is based on centralized decision making and state centered development while co governance is based on decentralized decision making and market oriented development to develop this argument we compare the energy matrix from the five andean countries venezuela colombia ecuador peru and bolivia

the wto trade effect this paper reexamines the gatt wto membership efiect on bilateral trade ows using nonparametric methods including pair matching permutation tests and a rosenbaum 2002 sensitivity analysis together these methods provide an estimation framework that is robust to misspeciflcation biases allows general forms of heterogeneous treatment efiects and addresses potential hidden selection biases this is in contrast to most conventional parametric studies on this issue our results suggest large gatt wto trade promoting efiects robust to various restricted matching criteria alternative indicators for gatt wto involvement different matching methodologies non random incidence of positive trade ows and inclusion of multilateral resistance terms

neoliberalism and the transformation of populism in latin america the peruvian case latin american populism is generally associated with the developmental stage of import substitution industrialization it is thus widely presumed to have been eclipsed by the debt crisis of the 1980s and the free market reforms of the neoliberal era however the leadership of alberto fujimori in peru suggests that new forms of populism may be emerging despite the fiscal constraints of neoliberal austerity this new variant of populism thrives in a context where economic crisis and social dislocation undermine traditional representative institutions enabling personalist leaders to establish unmediated relationships with heterogeneous atomized masses political support can be cultivated through populist attacks on entrenched political elites or institutions along with targeted but highly visible poverty alleviation programs this new form of populist autocracy complements the efforts of neoliberal technocrats to circumvent the representative institutions that are integral to democratic accountability the peruvian case thus demonstrates that populism has been transformed rather than eclipsed during the neoliberal era and that it should be decoupled theoretically from any particular phase or model of economic development

making land rights accessible social movements and political legal innovation in the rural philippines abstract in recent years rule of law and legal reform has grown to be a major concern of national governments international financial institutions development agencies and donor organisations part of this concern has focused on expanding access to justice for the poor however little effort has gone into understanding the role of justice sector institutions in shaping the opportunities and limits of redistributive justice little attention has been paid to the actual workings of obstacles entrenched within the justice sector to land reform for example instead pro market scholars cite difficult legal problems as a reason to turn away from state led land reform and toward market oriented land policies yet as this paper shows a closer look at the details of dynamics around land reform in the philippines suggests that political legal problems associated with implementation of the agrarian reform law can be overcome under certain conditions it is argued that for rural poor claimants it is important

native language spoken language translation and trade we construct new series for common native language and common spoken language for 195 countries which we use together with series for common official language and linguistic proximity in order to draw inferences about 1 the aggregate impact of all linguistic factors on bilateral trade 2 the separate role of ease of communication as distinct from ethnicity and trust and 3 the contribution of translation and interpreters to ease of communication the results show that the impact of linguistic factors all together is at least twice as great as the usual dummy variable for common language resting on official language would say in addition ease of communication plays a distinct role apart from ethnicity and trust and so far as ease of communication enters translation and interpreters are significant finally emigrants have much to do with the role of ethnicity and trust in linguistic influence

temptation in vote selling evidence from a field experiment in the philippines abstract we report the results of a randomized field experiment in the philippines on the effects of two common anti vote selling strategies involving eliciting promises from voters an invitation to promise not to vote sell is taken up by most respondents reduces vote selling and has a larger effect in races with smaller vote buying payments the treatment reduces vote selling in the smallest stakes election by 10 9 percentage points inviting voters to promise to vote your conscience despite accepting money is significantly less effective the results are consistent with a behavioral model in which voters are only partially sophisticated about their vote selling temptation

south korean and taiwanese development and the new institutional economics the publication of books by both alice amsden and robert wade provide an opportune moment to reflect on the study of east asian development after an initial surge of interest beginning in the 1970s the field has reached a plateau and scholars recently have cast a wide net in searching for ways to extend the field in assessing the state of the art regarding the economic development of the east asian newly industrialized countries nics this review will treat three themes first i will argue that the focus on states versus markets is becoming stale and that much of the scholarly interest lies in the politics behind the economics second i argue that political scientists have underexplored the historical origins of korean and taiwanese capitalism and that such attention promises to strengthen both theories and explanations of development third i argue that the international system has been more important in promoting development in east asia than accounts in the first wave have recognized the purpose of this review is to assess the field reveal

banking market integration in the sadc countries evidence from interest rate analyses this study investigates the state development and drivers of banking market integration in the member countries of the southern african development community sadc a principal component analysis pca of national retail interest rates indicates increasing integration in loan and deposit markets these integration processes are not developing uniformly and we can identify a convergence club when investigating the interest rate pass through from central bank onto retail rates for this convergence club we find both genuine and monetary integration driven processes though the latter dominate we thus conclude that a selective expansion of the common monetary area cma is possible

evaluating the econometric evaluations of training programs with experimental data this paper takes the results of an employment and training program thatwas run as a field experiment in which the participants were randomlyassigned into a treatment or a control group and compares these results to the estimates that might have been produced by an econometrician who evaluated the program using the same econometric procedures that have been used in the program evaluation literature this comparison shows that many of these econometric procedures fail toreplicate the experimentally determined results and suggests that researchers should be aware of the potential for specification errorsin other nonexperimental evaluations copyright 1986 by american economic association

public health investments and the infant mortality gap evidence from federal sanitation interventions on u s indian reservations abstract to what extent do differential levels of investment in public health inputs explain observed differences in health outcomes across socioeconomic and racial groups this study investigates the impact of 3700 projects that were part of a widespread federal initiative to improve sanitation infrastructure on u s indian reservations starting in 1960 sanitation investment substantially reduced the cost of clean water for households leading to sharp reductions in both waterborne gastrointestinal disease and infectious respiratory disease among native american infants the sanitation program was quite cost effective in part because improvements in the overall disease environment also reduced infectious respiratory disease among nearby white infants despite the health externalities federal sanitation interventions explain almost forty percent of the convergence in native american and white infant mortality rates in reservation counties since 1970

the socioeconomic determinants of ill gotten gains within person changes in drug use and illegal earnings generalizing from the sociology of earnings attainment we develop a conceptual model of social embeddedness in conventional and criminal activities to explain illegal earnings among criminal offenders to isolate the effects of time varying factors such as legal earnings drug use and criminal opportunities we use data from the national supported work demonstration project to estimate fixed effects models predicting month to month changes in illegal earnings we find that criminal earnings are sensitive to embeddedness in conforming work and family relationships criminal experience and the perceived risks and rewards of crime moreover heroin and cocaine use creates a strong earnings imperative that is difficult to satisfy in the low wage labor market and offenders earn far more money illegally when they are using these drugs than during periods of abstinence

political competition and violence in mexico hierarchical social control in local patronage structures many countries that have recently undergone transitions to democracy have experienced increases in violent crime yet sociological theories have generally failed to consider the impact of political factors on crime the author examines the relation between greater electoral competition and homicide at the subnational level in a country undergoing an uneven transition to democracy in societies characterized by the presence of patronage networks social and political changes that undermine the source of unequal exchange between actors at different levels in the social hierarchy result in a temporary loss of social control and an increase in crime the relation between electoral competition and homicide is tested using electoral results from a sample of 1 800 mexican municipalities greater electoral competition is associated with higher homicide rates across municipalities and over time even after controlling for standard correlates of violent crime consistent with the hypothesis that the increase is due to the disruption of patronage networks this association is present only in rural areas where patron client relations are more common

savings growth and the resource curse hypothesis an important connection between recent attempts to understand the determinants of economic growth and the measurement of sustainability is the finding of a negative and significant relationship between natural resource abundance and economic growth this is the so called resource curse hypothesis using cross country regressions we offer evidence that the curse may itself be a manifestation of the inability of governments to manage large resource revenues sustainably in particular these results offer another perspective on the resource curse hypothesis the countries where growth has lagged are those where the combination of natural resource macroeconomic and public expenditure policies have led to a low rate of genuine saving net saving adjusted for resource depletion

the difficult transition from clientelism to citizenship lessons from mexico author s fox jonathan a abstract electoral competition is necessary but not sufficient for the consolidation of democratic regimes not all elections are free and fair nor do they necessarily lead to actual civilian rule or respect for human rights if there is more to democracy than elections then there is more to democratization than the transition to elections but in spite of the rich literature on the emergence of electoral competition the dynamics of political transitions toward respect for other fundamental democratic rights is still not well understood political democracy is defined here in classic procedural terms free and fair electoral contestation for governing offices based on universal suffrage guaranteed freedoms of association and expression accountability through the rule of law and civilian control of the military although analyses of democratization typically acknowledge that these are all necessary criteria most examine only electoral competition this study however develops a framework for explaining progress toward another necessary condition for democratization respect for associational autonomy which allows citizens to organize in defense of their own interests and identities without fear of external intervention or punishment

democracy by undemocratic means elites political pacts and regime transition in brazil why has brazil failed to develop strong democratic institutions despite widespread opposition to authoritarianism and support for civilian rule in the 1980s this article argues that the political pacts bargained by elites that made the regime transition possible limited the extension of democracy by restoring to old regime elites many sources of their political power as the price for their support for democratization political pacts left the military with a substantial degree of formal and informal power over civilians preserved clientelism and undermined the ability of political parties to transform themselves into genuine transmission belts for nonelite interests the undemocratic character of the brazilian state as embodied by military autonomy technocratic modes of policymaking and executive dominance over the legislature moreover was reinforced by the defeat of parliamentarism by the constituent assembly in 1988

mafia elections and violence against politicians organized crime uses political violence to influence politics in a wide set of countries this paper exploits a novel dataset of attacks directed towards italian local politicians to study how and why criminal organizations use violence against them we test two complementary theories to predict the use of violence i before elections to affect the electoral outcome and ii after elections to influence politicians from the beginning of their term we provide causal evidence in favor of the latter hypothesis the probability of being a target of violence increases in the weeks right after an election in areas with a high presence of organized crime especially when elections result in a change of local government

shadow prices of social capital in rural india a nonparametric approach this article studies the role of social capital on cotton production efficiency and productivity for a sample of small farms in maharashtra india using data envelopment analysis input shadow prices are computed as an indicator of the importance of social capital relative to other inputs results suggest social capital to be the input with the highest contribution to production efficiency after land the luenberger indicator is used to assess the productivity improvement associated to an investment in social capital which is found to be on the order of 12 undertaking collective production activities is found to play an important role in improving productivity this is especially relevant to agricultural households facing important economic and institutional restrictions that make it difficult to increase conventional expensive inputs

the varieties of resource experience natural resource export structures and the political economy of economic growth 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

hands off my regime governments restrictions on foreign aid to non governmental organizations in poor and middle income countries many resource strapped developing country governments seek international aid but when that assistance is channeled through domestic civil society it can threaten their political control as a result in the last two decades 39 of the world s 153 low and middle income countries have adopted laws restricting the inflow of foreign aid to domestically operating nongovernmental organizations ngos governments recognize that such laws harm their international reputations for supporting democracy and may invite donor punishment in terms of aid reductions yet they perceive foreign aid to ngos as supporting political opponents and threatening their grip on power in the aftermath of competitive electoral victories governments often take new legal steps to limit these groups funding we test this argument on an original dataset of laws detailing the regulation of foreign aid inflows to domestically operating ngos in 153 low and middle income countries for the period 1993 2012 using an event history approach we find that foreign aid flows are associated with an increased risk of restrictive law adoption a log unit increase in foreign aid raises the probability of adoption by 6 7 this risk is exacerbated after the holding of competitive elections the interaction of foreign aid and competitive elections increases the probability of adoption by 11

trade spill overs of fiscal policy in the european union a panel analysis we explore the international spillovers from fiscal policy shocks via trade in europe a fiscal expansion stimulates domestic activity which leads to more foreign exports and hence higher foreign output to quantify this we combine a panel var model in government spending net taxes and gdp with a panel trade model on average a public spending increase equal to 1 of gdp implies 2 3 more foreign exports over the first two years the corresponding figure for an equal size net tax reduction is 0 6 both estimates are statistically significant as far as the effect on foreign activity is concerned a 1 of gdp spending increase net tax reduction in germany on average raises gdp of trading partners by 0 23 0 06 over the first two years these figures are likely to form lower bounds for the actual effects and suggest that it may be worthwhile to further investigate the benefits from coordinated fiscal expansions contractions in response to european wide cyclical downturns upswings

the nonlinear impact of currency unions on bilateral trade abstract most gravity model specifications assume that a currency union varies the level of bilateral trade between members by a constant proportion we demonstrate that a common currency also alters the slope of the relationship between bilateral trade and member country gdps

where does economic development really come from constitutional rule among the contemporary sioux and apache governments are public goods that provide the organizational and legal structures by which societies arrange and enforce rules of the game that enable divisions of labor exchange and collective action we argue that shared pre constitutional cultural norms of political legitimacy among rational individuals provide the foundations of effective self government the performance of contemporary apache and sioux economies on indian reservations governed by common federally imposed constitutions is examined to test the framework unlike the impoverished sioux the relatively successful apaches are found to have pre existing political norms that serendipidously match the structure of their formal constitution

participation social capital and intersectoral problem solving african and asian cases abstract cooperation in policy program implementation between state and nongovernmental actors can sometimes solve intractable development problems but such cooperation must span gaps in culture power resources and perspective this article provides a comparative analysis of 13 cases of intersectoral cooperation among public agencies nongovernmental organizations grassroots groups and international donors the analysis reveals two successful implementation patterns nongovernment organization ngo mediated cooperation and grassroots centered cooperation different forms of social capital are central to the two patterns indigenous ngos with credibility across sectors are critical to the former while grassroots organizations are vital to the latter participatory decision making and mutual influence are essential to grassroots centered cooperation but less so for ngo mediated collaboration

political capital mexican financial policy under salinas market reform is advocated in developing countries to improve economic efficiency and prevent privileged groups from obtaining rents from the policy making process yet this prescription fails to address the complex political process that governments are likely to confront when moving toward the market this study shows how political considerations during president salinas s administration distorted economic reform in mexico during the 1990s mexican finance policy contradicted the government s declared neoliberal principles while the banks were reprivatized and deregulated they were also given a high degree of protection from competition enabling the new owners to charge excessive interest rates in addition the government artificially inflated the value of the currency through exchange rate intervention these contradictory policies are best understood as a coherent political response to the electoral vulnerability of the ruling party pri at the end of the 1980s when viable political opposition threatened the pri s ability to maintain power it responded by using financial policies to distribute economic benefits to social groups particularly business the middle class and the poor whose support was critical for electoral victory

she works hard for the money household responsibilities and the allocation of work effort recent developments in human capital theory suggest that men and women differ in how they allocate effort to work activities this paper uses the 1973 and 1977 quality of employment surveys to test the assumtion that women allocate less effort to work because of their family and household responsibilities regression and ordered probit analyses show that on average women allocate more effort to work than do men further the sex difference is substantial when men and women with comparable family situations and market human capital are compared the paper discusses how experiments on sex differences in standards of personal entitlement and research on sex segregated workplaces provide an alternative to the economists perspective finally the paper argues for an integration of human capital models research on social equity and structural theories of work organization in order to provide a more complete explanation of men s and women s orientations toward work and family

the governance institutions of a drug trafficking organization how do drug trafficking organizations organize drug trafficking organizations continue to operate effectively despite incentives for members to defect pressure from damaged communities and government interdiction efforts this paper identifies the problem of defection in this context and applies insights from the literatures on club goods and extralegal governance institutions to explain the puzzling organization and activities of one of mexico s most dangerous drug trafficking organizations la familia michoacana the group uses a reward and punishment scheme to prevent defection from members and to elicit cooperation from the community and government

institutional assets for negotiating the terms of development indigenous collective action and oil in ecuador and alaska abstract case studies of two oil fields with superficial similarities same company same time period similar anticipated scale of production similar remote field design similarly situated in indigenous territory show radically different benefits for the adjacent indigenous communities this analysis finds that the major differences driving these results are institutional primarily differences in property rights regimes and secondarily in local institutional development in the alaska context the community was able to negotiate a direct share of the royalties while the ecuadorian community was entitled only to an indirect revenue share from the national government both communities also negotiated for various community assistance projects from the company the ecuadorian communities likely would have succeeded in instituting their sustainable development proposal if they had stronger local organization comparative analysis of the factors for local institutional development fit well in the conceptual

market reform as a stimulus to particularistic politics we know little about how market reform affects political development especially citizens behavior market reform advocates prescribe that citizens should reduce their reliance on the state turn to nonstate actors for assistance and obtain limited state goods and services through their membership in certain social categories not their particular traits an analysis of three mass surveys and 232 interviews the author conducted in central asia along with additional data from 24 postcommunist countries reveals that market reform can have effects opposite from those prescribed individuals may make particularistic demands of government officials instead of relying on nonstate actors this occurs in countries where state economic intervention was substantial and where reforms reduced the state s economic role but failed to develop market enhancing institutions under these conditions individuals informally seek resources from state officials because nonstate actors do not offer substitute resources and

institutional analysis and the resource curse in developing countries abstract the present article examines the recent advances reported in the literature regarding the mechanisms underlying the resource curse in developing countries by analyzing the rule of law index we investigated how the institutions responsible for allocating hydrocarbon royalties can help minimize the effects of the resource curse we used a qualitative methodology based on case studies the results show that evidence of legal violations on the part of these institutions and the lack of tools in resource rich developing countries to uphold basic social and economic rights are associated with the resource curse our findings suggest that strengthening the institutions closer monitoring of oil revenue allocations and public participation can help to alleviate the resource curse

why did drug cartels go to war in mexico subnational party alternation the breakdown of criminal protection and the onset of large scale violence this article explains why mexican drug cartels went to war in the 1990s when the federal government was not pursuing a major antidrug campaign we argue that political alternation and the rotation

spanning the institutional abyss the intergovernmental network and the governance of foreign direct investment global economic transactions such as foreign direct investment fdi must extend over an institutional abyss between the jurisdiction and therefore protection of the states involved intergovernmental organizations igos represent an important attempt to span this abyss the authors use a network approach to demonstrate that the connections between two countries through joint membership in the same igos are associated with a large positive influence on the fdi that flows between them moreover they show that this effect occurs not only in the case of connections through economic igos but also through those with social and cultural mandates this demonstrates that relational governance is important and feasible in the global context even for the most risky transactions the authors also examine the interdependence between the igo network and the domestic institutions of states social and cultural igo connections do more and economic igo connections less to increase fdi when the target country is mo

sex segregation and sectors an analysis of gender differences in returns from employer changes sweet james 1973 women in the labor force new york seminar press vanek joann 1974 time spent in housework scientific american 231 116 20 1980 household work wage work and sexual equality pp 275 91 in sarah f berk ed women and household labor beverly hills ca sage walker k and m woods 1976 time use a measure of household production of family goods and services washington d c american home economics association

cross scalar dynamics of the resource curse constraints on local participation in the bolivian gas sector abstractcontributing to debate on the contextual underpinnings and varieties of the resource curse this article points to how political and economic dynamics of resource endowments operate in interrelated but potentially contradictory ways across spatial scales resource endowments insert a complex set of incentives and interests into the political arena in ways that both enable and constrain actors at different scales using a case study of gas governance in bolivia the article illustrates the interrelation of these dynamics across local national and international scales and in particular how they circumscribe the space for local participation

perspectives on positive political economy this volume serves as an introduction to the field of positive political economy and the economic and political processes with which it is concerned this new research tradition is distinct from both normative and historical approaches to political economy grounded in the rational actor methodology of microeconomics positive political economy is the study of rational decisions in a context of political and economic institutions more analytical than traditional approaches it is concerned with the derivation of principles and propositions against which real world experience may be compared its focus is on empirical regularities and its goal is theoretical explanation the field has focused on three main areas of research models of collective action constraints on competitive market processes and the analysis of transaction costs developments in all of these areas are covered in the book the first part of the volume surveys the field while the second part displays positive political economy at work examining a variety of subjects the final part contains essays by leading political economists on the theoretical foundations of the field

political foundations of the resource curse in this paper we argue that the political incentives that resource endowments generate are the key to understanding whether or not they are a curse we show 1 politicians tend to over extract natural resources relative to the efficient extraction path because they discount the future too much and 2 resource booms improve the efficiency of the extraction path however 3 resource booms by raising the value of being in power and by providing politicians with more resources which they can use to influence the outcome of elections increase resource misallocation in the rest of the economy 4 the overall impact of resource booms on the economy depends critically on institutions since these determine the extent to which political incentives map into policy outcomes countries with institutions that promote accountability and state competence will tend to benefit from resource booms since these institutions ameliorate the perverse political incentives that such booms create countries without such institutions however may suffer from a resource curse

beyond the machine clientelist brokers and interest organizations in latin america organizational membership is one of the strongest yet overlooked predictors of vote buying across latin america we argue that this relationship is driven by the fact that politicians outsource some of their vote buying efforts to interest associations in contrast to the existing literature that focuses on party brokers who are loyal to a single political machine we introduce the concepts of organizational brokers who represent interest associations and renegotiate ties to political parties between election cycles and hybrid brokers who split their loyalties between an interest association and a single political party we illustrate the operation of these alternative broker types through case studies of street vending organizations in an uninstitutionalized party system colombia and peasant organizations in an institutionalized party system mexico attention to the role of brokers and the organizations that they represent has implications for political accountability collective action and the

from local strongman to facilitator institutional incentives for participatory municipal governance in latin america efforts to engage citizens in democratic forms of governance in developing societies are complicated by deeply rooted socioeconomic and political inequalities in this article the authors analyze

government action social capital and development reviewing the evidence on synergy abstract instead of assuming a zero sum relationship between government involvement and private cooperative efforts the five preceding articles argue for the possibility of state society synergy that active government and mobilized communities can enhance each others developmental efforts this article draws on these articles to explore the forms and sources of state society synergy i argue that synergy usually combines complementarity with embeddedness and is most easily fostered in societies characterized by egalitarian social structures ard robust coherent state bureaucracies i also argue however that synergy is constructable even in the more adverse circumstances typical of third world countries

implicit contracts a survey 7mplicit contracts resolve the distribution of uncertainty and utilization of specific human capital between risk averse workers and less risk averse firms incomplete contracts are required to yield involuntary layoffs in contract markets otherwise contracts are efficient and pareto optimal by construction there is a close relation between contract theory and neoclassical labor market theory contracts smooth consumption but increase the volatility of labor supply and labor utilization to demand disturbances because contractural insurance eliminates the income effects of socially diversifiable risks this result is similar to the intertemporal substitution hypothesis however the price mechanism in a contract is substantially different contracts embody a nonlinear two part pricing scheme the lump sum part allocates the income consumption consequences of risks and the marginal pricing part allocates production and labor utilization this implicit pricing mechanism is in all respects flexible though the observed average hourly wage combines both parts and may give the outward appearanceof rigidity furthermore the observed average wage rate in a contract does not reflect marginal conditions necessary for structural econometric estimation indivisibilities appear necessary to account for the split between work sharing and layoffs contracts with private information are also considered in the nonlinear pricing context this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

political parties and uncertainty in developing democracies this article lays out a theoretical framework for understanding the effects of political uncertainty on party development and strategies of mobilization and competition defining uncertainty as the imprecision with which political actors are able to predict future interactions the authors identify three types of political uncertainty regime uncertainty economic uncertainty and institutional uncertainty they argue that political uncertainty is particularly high among developing democracies contributing to puzzling empirical patterns of party development and competition in these contexts taking into account the role of uncertainty in the strategic decision making of party elites will help scholars better understand the differences between parties in advanced and developing democracies but it can also help scholars understand the less dramatic differences between parties even within advanced democracies the authors theoretical framework can be applied broadly since uncertainty informs the strategic

on the distribution of exchange rate regime treatment effects on international trade abstract this paper provides evidence of heterogeneous treatment effects on trade for six different types of exchange rate regime transitions utilizing data on 218 643 country pair year observations all together previous research mainly focused on the currency union effect on trade and widely assumed that country pairs with identical observable characteristics receive the same effect we test the hypothesis of a homogeneous treatment effect empirically and find substantive statistical support for the presence of effect heterogeneity moreover we characterize the probability distribution of effect heterogeneity among observationally equivalent country pairs by way of a random coefficients model we estimate selected features of the empirical distributions of the treatment effects for each of the six different types of exchange rate regime transitions under two different sets of assumptions about the probability distribution of effect heterogeneity our findings suggest that the immediate effects on trade from switching to an exchange rate regime different from the one in the outset have wide waists and exhibit large positive extreme values we estimate the probability of two countries to experience an immediate positive effect on the growth of bilateral trade due to the adoption of any new exchange rate regime tighter or not to be approximately one half

short term employment transitions of women in the israeli labor force using data on jewish israeli women aged 25 to 55 the author examines patterns and determinants of women s transitions among four employment categories regular full time employment reduced hours full time employment part time employment and non employment israeli women are not trapped in part time employment departures from reduced hour and part time employment occur at higher rates than departures from full time jobs women who have just given birth have an increased likelihood of moving from full time employment to reduced hour or part time employment women in female type occupations and those in peripheral jobs jobs outside core industries are more likely than other women to reduce their work hours or exit the labor force the author argues that although part time work is a valuable short term option for many women in the long run it preserves labor market institutions that are disadvantageous to women

currency unions and international integration this paper characterizes the integration patterns of international currency unions such as the cfa franc zone we empirically explore different features of currency unions and compare them to countries with sovereign monies by examining the criteria for mundellos concept of an optimum currency area we find that members of currency unions are more integrated than countries with their own currencies for instance we find that currency union members have more trade and less volatile real exchange rates than countries with their own monies business cycles are more highly synchronized across currency union countries than across countries with sovereign monies

supporters or challengers the effects of nongovernmental organizations on local politics in bolivia how do nongovernmental organizations ngos affect local politics in developing democracies specifically do ngos have systematic effects on the fortunes of incumbent political parties in local elections existing work predicts starkly contradictory political effects some scholars claim that ngos most likely help incumbents by providing services for which politicians can claim credit whereas others believe that ngos most likely hurt incumbents by facilitating political opposition the authors argue that both of these effects are possible depending on the size of a jurisdiction s population in smaller populations the authors hypothesize that ngos facilitate collective action and decrease the ability of an incumbent to claim credit for projects larger jurisdictions water down the effect of ngos on collective action and permit incumbents credit claiming strong support is found for hypotheses using electoral sociodemographic and ngo data for all of 314 municipalities in bolivia

defying the law of gravity the political economy of international migration bilateral flows of international migrants exhibit tremendous variance both across destination countries and over time to explain this variance studies of international migration tend to focus on economic determinants such as income differentials or on social conditions such as the presence of coethnics in certain destination countries the authors argue that migration is driven not solely by economic or social determinants rather the political environment across destinations plays a substantively large role in influencing bilateral migration flows they test the importance of the political environment citizenship rights and the prominence of right wing parties using data on migration flows from 178 origin countries into 18 destination countries over the period 1980 2006 they find even after controlling for a variety of economic social policy and international variables that variation in political environments across time and destination plays a key role in observed patterns of international migration

exploratory assessment of the economic gains of a pre salt oil field in brazil abstract in recent years brazil has made public several oil discoveries located in deep waters below the salt layer discoveries are steadily enhancing national reserves and have brought the country into a new role in the global oil industry this paper aims at investigating the economic gains that could be expected from a brazilian oil field in the pre salt region analyses were conducted based on the libra field the largest oil discovery in brazil until now with approximately 10 billion barrels the results were calculated for different scenarios of oil prices companies arrangements and regulatory regimes the findings suggest that economic gains could be higher for the brazilian government if the oil production were conducted under a service contract scheme however considering the current production sharing regime in force for pre salt areas economic gains could be higher if a bidding process was conducted ensuring for the brazilian government a higher participation in the oil to be produced additionally the results demonstrate that under the current rules applied for the production sharing regime the government quota of oil has decreased over time putting at risk economic results