Doctoral Dissertation
Assessing Sensitive Development and Conflict Resolution Issues in
Afghanistan: Application of Randomized Conjoint Design and List
Experiment(Summary)

NEMATULLAH HOTAK

Graduate School for International Development and Cooperation
Hiroshima University

September 2022

Armed conflict and violence can have direct costs like loss of human capital and destruction ofphysical infrastructure in society. But it also creates indirect consequences through its impact
on the economy and household decisions like child labor and early school drop-out. Earlier
studies on conflict resolutions and child labor tend to focus on the direct cause of armed conflictand its impact on child labor. In this study, we tried to identify the fiscal illusion problem, asignificant barrier for any development program, including child labor programs, and find thekey strategies for creating an optimal policy package to solve the protracted conflict inAfghanistan.
Further, in this study, we measure the public support for the future political model where wecan accommodate the Taliban. In detail, three sub-objectives of this dissertation are discussed
as follows: To attain the first objective, in chapter 2, we intentionally designed two similar
hypothetical anti-child labor policy target programs, the difference in budget allocation or cost
scheme using a fully randomized conjoint analysis and compared the supporting rate for theanti-child labor policy program between the two groups namely: tax payment and share ofgovernment expenditure. The estimated results of the average marginal component effects(AMCEs) between the two program cost attributes of two profiles showed completely opposite
directions, suggesting that a significant fiscal illusion problem exists among central
government officials working in Kabul. Moreover, women and staff in lower government
positions were found to be more biased.
Regarding the second objective (chapter 3), this dissertation examined the impact of three
information strategies on preferences for hypothetical key provisions of a peace agreement
between the Afghan government and the Taliban. As Afghanistan is home to intractableconflicts that gained complexity in the past two decades due to the participation of foreign
powers and human rights violations perpetrated by the Taliban regime. Thus, we expected thatthe historical information (i.e., the Hiroshima phoenix episode), pecuniary information, andreligious information that would be provided to a sample of business elites and employees inKabul might observe the change in their perceptions toward the Taliban and this change would
signal pro-peace behavior and support for a peace agreement.
The results showed that all three information strategies significantly increased therespondents’ support for a peace agreement. In terms of the aggregate impact of information
strategies on the respondents’ preferences, pecuniary information had the most influence,
followed by historical information about the Hiroshima phoenix episode, with religious
information having the least effect. The third and last objective (chapter 4) contributes toidentifying the true public behavior toward accommodating the Taliban in a future politicalsystem and shows that the current situation where the Taliban imposed their regime on theAfghan people is not based on the free well of people. Further, this study quantified the degreeof social desirability bias, in which respondents answer the questions in a socially desirable
and acceptable manner instead of revealing their actual perceptions.
In the context of public support for accommodating an unwanted neighbor in a politicalsystem, this bias emerges based on their direct fear of the insurgent groups and their Islamicbeliefs. To identify the characteristics of the public in favor of and against the Taliban, thisstudy mitigated the social desirability bias by conducting the item count technique combinedwith the direct question. The overall results of this chapter show that respondents tend tosupport the establishment of a free, democratic, and inclusive government that includes
representatives from all ethnic groups across the country.