Earthquakes, hurricanes, and terrorism: do natural disasters incite terror?

A novel and important issue in contemporary security policy is the impact of natural disasters on terrorism. Natural disasters can strain a society and its government, creating vulnerabilities which terrorist groups might exploit. Using a structured methodology and detailed data on terrorism, disasters, and other relevant controls for 167 countries between 1970 and 2007, we find a strong positive impact of disaster-related deaths on subsequent terrorism incidence and fatalities. Furthermore, the effects differ by disaster type and GDP per capita. The results consistently are significant and robust across a multitude of disaster and terrorism measures for a diverse set of model specifications.     

The Terror that Failed: Public Opinion in the Aftermath of the Bombing in Oklahoma City

Did the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City affect the public's perception of terrorism as a political issue and their perceptions of individual risk and personal vulnerability? The author finds that the bombing in Oklahoma City altered neither the public's assessment of personal risk nor its reported behavior. Public opinion on terrorism and crime share three patterns: (1) perceived risk of victimization and the likely consequences affect public apprehension; (2) the voiced sense of personal security bears a direct relationship to the relative familiarity of the setting; and (3) the public shows resistance to the media's portrayal of risk. Opinion data indicate that domestic terrorism is likely to be seen as important in general and in the abstract, but with low personal risk, little impact on individuals' routine behavior, and, consequently, low political salience. In light of terrorism's purpose of inducing fear and the public's generally placid response on a personal level, the author concludes that the bombing failed as an act of domestic terrorism.     

Impact of COVID-19 on Bangladesh's agriculture sector and the ways forward to recovery: An overview

The COVID-19 outbreak has left an indelible effect on Bangladesh's agriculture sector, like that of most developing countries. Considering that agriculture is the cornerstone of Bangladesh's economy, we made an effort to compile a detailed scenario of COVID-19's effect on it through a relevant literature review. Since no significant studies outlined a complete picture of the pandemic's impact on agriculture, our study ventured to reveal the circumstances of each sub-sector of agriculture. During the early phases of the pandemic, farmers engaged in agriculture production got poor prices, with the majority of them incurring losses. Labor shortages and input scarcity were the most prevailing hindrances across all the sub-sectors. The export volume seemed to shrink hugely, hurting the country's GDP. The supply chain for agricultural commodities was disrupted as a result of the lockdown and mobility restrictions, which resulted in the elimination of the majority of intermediaries. Unprecedented challenges occurred in the input and output markets, as well as in the agro-industries, exacerbating the situation. However, while the vegetables and poultry sub-sectors recovered utterly and the dairy sub-sector somehow managed to stabilize, other sub-sectors are still grieving. This study highlighted some policies that can mitigate the miseries of the agriculture sector and overcome further potential threats in Bangladesh and other agriculture-led developing countries.     

Is Standing for Women a Stand Against Terrorism? Exploring the Connection Between Women's Rights and Terrorism

Previous large-N studies have found that the advancement of women's rights leads to a decline in conflict, but no large-N research has explored the possibility of a similar relationship between women's rights and terrorism. Nevertheless, policymakers have long argued that the advancement of women's rights forms a key component of counterterrorism policy. Simply put, we lay out a rationale for the argument that increased women's rights reduce the likelihood of terrorism. We test this hypothesis using CIRI's women's rights data combined with two datasets accounting for domestic terrorism and the production of transnational terrorism. While the results show that women's rights overall are not a panacea for both types of terrorism, the provision of women's rights is shown to have a negative relationship with domestic terrorism. States and international institutions should take the differing effects of women's rights across different types of terrorism into account when designing counterterrorism policies.     

Driving growth: Regulatory reform and expressways in Indonesia

This article uses the case study of Indonesian governments' attempts to construct a 1,000 kilometer toll road through the densest parts of Java to shed light on how governments with a checkered past of enforcing contracts and protecting private property rights go about establishing the requisite regulatory framework to attract private investment for infrastructure. While regulatory reform has taken place in Indonesia, vested interests and power will keep the country's political economy from taking on World Bank-promoted best practice characteristics. Programs that promote private sector participation in infrastructure need to be reconsidered where the main ingredients for these programs' success exist in small measures.     

Interest Groups and Investment: A Further Test of the Olson Hypothesis

Mancur Olson's institutional sclerosishypothesis may be evident in the effects ofinterest groups on investment in physicalcapital. To test this proposition, we usecross sectional data on 42 countries forwhich information on the number of interestgroups is available to estimate the effectof those groups on the share of GDP thatgoes into physical investment. The resultsindicate that interest groups have adifferent effect on physical investment inOECD and non-OECD countries. In the OECDcountries, we find support for thehypothesis that interest groups harminvestment in physical capital. Indeveloping countries, interest groupseither have no effect on physicalinvestment or they have a slight beneficialimpact.     

Does India's growth matter? Evidence from the SAARC nations

The study estimates the extent of spillover effects that India's real per capita gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate has on the growth rates of other countries in the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) region for the period 2003–2016. It also identifies whether the conventional trade channel is the means through which growth is transmitted from India to her neighboring countries. Using a random effects model, we conclude that on average, a 1 percentage point increase in India's real per capita GDP growth rate results in 0.46 percentage point increase in the per capita GDP growth rates of other SAARC nations. However, this does not occur through the trade channel primarily due to low levels of intraregional trade. Also, using time dummies, the paper analyzes whether there has been any significant change in the degree of spillover effects in the postfinancial crisis period, where countries have been observed to insulate themselves to a certain extent.     

Empirical determinants of corruption: A sensitivity analysis

Many variables have been proposed by past studies as significant determinants of corruption. This paper asks if their estimated impact on corruption is robust to alteration of the information set. A “Global Sensitivity Analysis”, based on the Leamer's Extreme-Bounds Analysis gives a clear answer: five variables are robustly related to corruption. Corruption is lower in richer countries, where democratic institutions have been preserved for a long continuous period, and the population is mainly Protestant. Corruption is instead higher where political instability is a major problem. Finally, a country's colonial heritage appears to be a significant determinant of present corruption.     

Coercion,Information, and the Success of Sanction Threats

This article explores when and why sanction threats succeed in extracting concessions from the targeted country. We focus on two different, albeit not mutually exclusive, mechanisms that can explain the success of sanction threats. The first mechanism relates to incomplete information regarding the sanctioner's determination to impose sanctions and suggests that threats help to extract concessions by revealing the sanctioner's resolve. The second mechanism underscores the direct impact of common interest between the two countries and explains the success of sanction threats by the targeted country's greater dependence on this link between the two countries and the sanctioner's ability to exploit this dependence. We test the hypotheses using a new strategic structural estimator. Our results provide no evidence in favor of the informational hypothesis, while lending robust support for the coercive hypothesis.     

Managing development policy in Botswana: Implementing reforms for rapid change

In recent years, Botswana's international reputation as a nation with sound development management has been slightly tarnished and the country's government has become increasingly concerned about the declining performance of its development management machinery. This concern of the government has been translated into a series of reform measures designed to bring about rapid change. This article discusses and analyses those reform measures and their potential impact on the development management process in Botswana. It was determined that the reform measures were, for the most part, carefully crafted and are being purposefully implemented, showing the nation, once again, to be one with good governance.     

Argentina: a good start for Macri

Argentina's new president Mauricio Macri has moved quickly and decisively to mend the country's ailing economy and fix its international debt problems, signalled his intention to usher in more pragmatic and open foreign and trade policies, and earned high approval ratings. But the country's domestic economic problems are daunting, and Macri's remedial measures will take time to bear fruit.     

Leeway for Personal Impact: The Case of Foreign-Policy Making in Norway*

Setting their focus on the role of decision-makers at intermediate and higher levels of a country's foreign policy administration, the authors analyze contextual factors that may determine the impact of decision-makers' personal characteristics on foreign policy. The article highlights the dynamics of these factors in the case of Norwegian foreign policy-making in the mid- and late 1970s. Over time, there has been a general relaxation of formal bureaucratic constraints, including the use of internally recruited political appointment, compounded by the growth of non-traditional international public affairs. The Foreign Minister's leadership style appears to have served as a catalyst to create an environment in which middle-to-upper level administrative leaders and political appointees have had greater opportunity than previously to garner influence and make it felt.     

Indonesia and bilateral trade agreements (BTAs)

Abstract

This paper analyses the perspectives of Indonesian state and non-state actors towards their country's increasing tendency to use bilateral trade agreements (BTAs) as part of its foreign economic policy. Unlike the other original members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the Indonesian government has been rather slow in pursuing a BTA policy with non-ASEAN member countries. Nevertheless, due to the proliferation of BTAs in other ASEAN countries' foreign economic policies, it was inevitable that Indonesia would pursue similar agreements with its non-ASEAN major trading partners. Despite this, it remains questionable whether Indonesia's participation in such trade agreements will produce such positive results for Indonesian economy. The attitude of the majority of Indonesian domestic constituents to date remains sceptical to this type of agreement. This is not only because BTAs create specific obligations on a range of issues, from trade and investment regimes, this trade strategy also involves deeper and more comprehensive commitments that those agreed at the multilateral level.     

‘New spaces’ for change?: Diamond governance reforms and the micro‐politics of participation in post‐war Sierra Leone

While the majority of research carried out on diamonds and development in Sierra Leone has focused on debates concerning the role that diamonds played in the country's civil war of the 1990s, little attention has been directed towards understanding how the emergence and consequences of ‘new spaces’ for citizen engagement in diamond governance are shaping relationships between mining and political economic change in the post‐war period. Recent fieldwork carried out in two communities in Kono District illustrates how the emergence of such spaces—although much celebrated by government, donors and development practitioners—may not necessarily be creating the ‘room for manoeuvre’ necessary to open up meaningful public engagement in resource governance. The analysis focuses on one recent governance initiative in the diamond sector—the Diamond Area Community Development Fund (DACDF)—which aims to strengthen citizen participation in decision‐making within the industry, but has frequently been at the centre of controversy. In framing and articulating socio‐environmental struggles over resource access and control in Sierra Leone's post‐war period of transition, the article highlights how the emerging geographies of participation continue to be shaped by unequal power relationships, in turn having an impact on livelihood options, decision‐making abilities and development outcomes in the country's diamondiferous communities. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Revisiting the trade and unemployment nexus: Empirical evidence from the Nigerian economy

The recent exacerbation of unemployment crisis in Nigeria stands to be a serious threat to both socio‐economic stability and progress of the country just as the report from the Bureau of Statistics shows that at least over 8.5 million people had no gainful employment at all as at the last quarter of the year 2017. It is on the above premise, that the present study explores the link between trade and unemployment for the case of Nigeria with the intention of exploring how the unemployment crisis has been impacted within the dynamics of the country's trade performance. The empirical evidence shows that the nation's terms of trade were insignificant to unemployment rate, while trade openness and domestic investment, on the other hand, have significant opposing impacts on unemployment in Nigeria over the period of the study. Further breakdowns from the empirical analysis also revealed that the Philips curves proposition is valid within the Nigerian economic context, while the evidences for the validity of Okun's law only exist in the short‐run scenario. Based on the empirical results, we recommend that concerted effort should be geared toward stimulating domestic investment by providing adequate financial and infrastructural facilities that will promote ease of doing business while utmost precautions are taken to ensure that unemployment crisis is not exacerbated when combating inflation in the economy in the wake of dynamic trade relations.     

Exchange rate policy modeling and forecasting the exchange rate: Indian rupee vis‐à‐vis the U.S. dollar

The exchange rate is a very important key financial variable that affects decisions made by the foreign exchange investors, exporters, importers, bankers, businesses, financial institutions, policymakers, and tourists in the developed as well as the developing world. Exchange rate fluctuations affect the value of international investment portfolios, competitiveness of exports and imports, value of international reserves, currency value of debt payments, and the cost of tourists. Movements in exchange rates thus have very important implications for any country's economy's business cycle, trade, and capital flows and are therefore crucial for understanding financial developments and changes in economic policy. The study will be looking at the various aspects of country's economic policy with respect to the exchange rate and modeling and forecasting the exchange rate. The study will be analyzing India's exchange rate story and will be discussing the structure of the foreign exchange market in India in terms of participants, instruments, and trading platform as also a turnover in the Indian foreign exchange market and forward premia. The study will be attempting to develop a model for the rupee–dollar exchange rate taking into account variables from monetary and microstructure models as well as other variables including intervention by the central bank. The main focus will be on the exchange rate of the Indian rupee vis‐à‐vis the U.S. dollar, that is, the Re/$ rate. The data will be covering from January 1990 through April 2013. This study will be examining the forecasting performance of the monetary model and various extensions of it in the vector autoregressive and Bayesian vector autoregressive framework.     

Unintended consequences: social policy,state institutions and the ‘stalling’ of the Malaysian industrialization project

Abstract

This paper examines the relation of particular forms of social and labour market policy to economic development. Taking the history of Malaysian industrialization as its empirical case, the paper assesses the unintended consequences of redistribution policy, on the one hand, and migration policy, on the other, for the limited upgrading of the country's electronics industry. It argues that, while the former has been central to social harmony in Malaysia's multi-racial society, it has contributed to the underdevelopment of small and medium-sized firms capable of linking with the TNCs on the basis of knowledge-intensive and higher value-added operations. Migration policy, on the other hand, has allowed manufacturers to have continued access to supplies of low-cost, lower-skilled labour that have released the pressures that would otherwise have been there for technological and skill upgrading in the electronics industry. Only in Penang, where regional state institutions have intervened to encourage SME upgrading, has the national picture been moderated. Malaysia's industrialization project emerged at time when export competition in manufactured commodities was less intense than it is now. Largely as a result of federal government priorities and for other reasons explored in the paper, advantage was not taken of this ‘window of opportunity’. As a consequence, the country's industrialization project – exemplified by its electronics industry – is now ‘stalling’ in the sense that it remains locked into low- to medium-technology operations. With the rise of China as a manufacturing exporter, this is a dangerous situation for a country's principal industry to be in.     

China in East Asia: The process and implications of regionalization

This paper assesses the impact of foreign direct investment on China's integration into the East Asian regional economy. The phenomenal growth of investment since 1992 has both benefited from, and also fuelled, the growth of local autonomy in post‐Mao China. The central state's ability to control the process of integration has subsequently been significantly undermined as the relationship between the local and the international becomes ever more important. While the tendency to emphasize low cost production advantages has attracted considerable inward investment in some areas, impressive short‐term growth rates may hide less beneficial long‐term consequences for China's position within East Asia, and for the trajectory of China's development in general.     

Bargaining Power of Smaller States in Germany's Länderfinanzausgleich 1979–90

In this paper we explore the impact of politicalfactors on redistribution across the states in theGerman Länderfinanzausgleich. From a public choiceperspective the smaller states are supposed to have ahigher influence on decisions in the secondlegislative chamber due to a lower shadow price oftheir votes, which implies a higher bargaining power.As the federal government's policy depends on amajority in the second chamber there is an incentiveto buy smaller states' votes. Controlling for GDP percapita, we find statistically significant support forour hypotheses.     

The political economy of mass privatisation and imperfect taxation: Winners and loosers

This article investigates the connection between the apparently uncorrelated issues of tax evasion and privatisation in a political economy framework. We first consider how the political process – given a country's level of development and income distribution – will affect the efficiency of the tax system. We then discuss the impact of the efficiency of the taxation system on the outcomes of privatisation. We consider under which condition privatisation will proceed, and who will be the political supporters as well as the main winners of the privatisation process. Moreover, we investigate the impact of different forms of corruption both on the initial public support for privatisation, as well as on its long term political sustainability.