Remittances and Chain Migration: Longitudinal Evidence from Bosnia and Herzegovina

Abstract

Most of the literature on remittances focuses on their implications for the welfare of family members in the country of origin and disregards their role as facilitator of chain migration. We address this issue with the use of longitudinal data from Bosnia and Herzegovina, one of the primary exporters of migrants and recipients of remittances in the world. We find that remittances have a significant positive impact on the migration prospects of their recipients. Better-endowed people are most likely to migrate, which highlights a potential negative implication of migration and remittances.     

Who Do You Trust? Ethnicity and Trust in Bosnia and Herzegovina

This article examines the question of trust in Bosnia and Herzegovina with a special focus on the role of ethnicity. We find generalised trust to be low and declining in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Moreover, generalised trust is negatively affected by the degree of ethnic heterogeneity in the region. However, a further examination of trust reveals a more complex relationship between ethnicity and trust: people tend to show low levels of trust in all other people irrespective of their ethnic belongings. We argue that ethnic distribution might capture some other regional specific characteristics that also affect the level of trust.     

Trust in Government and Subsidy Reform: Evidence from a Survey of Indian Farmers

What accounts for the persistence of inefficient subsidies? What are the obstacles to their reform? We examine the role of trust in government among farmers in explaining support for reforming India’s energy subsidies. The subsidies under study hold back efforts to provide a reliable supply of agricultural power and contribute to the unsustainable extraction of groundwater. This water-energy nexus in rural India represents both a poverty-perpetuating policy equilibrium and a crisis in environmental governance. Informed by interviews and focus groups, we conduct an original survey of 2010 farmers in Bihar, Gujarat, and Rajasthan and analyze this data on the preferences of “vested interests”—those most affected by potential reform—to demonstrate the crucial role of political trust, especially trust in the national government, in predicting farmers’ political support for reforms. Our findings have practical implications for environmental governance and rural development and contribute to understanding the political economy of social policy reform in a developing democracy.     

Institutions and Caribbean Economic Performance: Insights from Jamaica

We explore the impact of social institutions on economic performance in Jamaica through a reinterpretation of the plantation economic model. In its original form, the plantation model fails to develop a causal link between the plantation legacy and persistent underdevelopment. Despite its marginalization, the model remains useful for discussions on growth and development. Consequently, we offer a reappraisal using the causal insights from Kenneth Sokoloff and Stanley Engerman. We use two examples to demonstrate how inequality encourages the formation of institutions that are inconsistent with growth, and an empirical analysis to confirm the hypothesized relationship between inequality, institutions, and economic development. Since inequality is expected to influence growth indirectly, we use a structural specification, which follows William Easterly’s recent test of Sokoloff and Engerman’s argument. Our reliance on a time-series specification is unique. We demonstrate that the expectation that, on average, inequality and growth is negatively related and that institutions may compromise growth are accurate for Jamaica, the most cited Caribbean nation in the current discourse. Our results carry several policy implications, including support for the recent calls in Jamaica for political restructuring. However, both the paucity of similar studies and the importance of the implications for sustainable growth and development demand further analyses.

A year in Bosnia: What was achieved

The challenges presented to the UN and the international community following the Cold War demand new responses and thinking with regard to peacekeeping operations. The situation in the former Yugoslavia provided a forum in which to develop a new approach to peacekeeping. The UN operated in a humanitarian role within a civil war, and a much greater level of enforcement was required than in other peacekeeping missions. The Security Council mandates defined the aspirations and limitations of the international community. Although at times the UN peacekeepers used high levels of force, it was not, and did not allow itself to be seen as, unacceptably partial or applying undue force. In a peacekeeping situation, there is still a clear need for a campaign plan to ensure cooperation between all organizations and the delivery of humanitarian aid. A UN mission cannot operate in a political vacuum; gains made on the security front will be lost if political momentum is not maintained.     

Tansnationals and foreign trade: Evidence from Brazil

A recursive model of exports and imports of manufactures, in which imports depend in part on exports, is estimated using data for a cross‐section of 17,053 industrial firms. In this sample, 652 firms are foreign‐owned. Explanatory variables include firm size, skill intensity, advertising and other variables in addition to foreign ownership. Foreign ownership has a large, independent effect on both export performance and import propensities, but foreign ownership in itself explains little of the relatively low export/import ratios registered by affiliates of transnationals.     

Aid and Sectoral Growth: Evidence from Panel Data

This article examines empirically the proposition that aid to poor countries is detrimental for external competitiveness, giving rise to Dutch disease type effects. At the aggregate level, aid is found to have a positive effect on growth. A sectoral decomposition shows that the effect is (i) significant and positive in the tradable and the nontradable sectors, and (ii) equally strong in both sectors. The article thus provides no empirical support for the hypothesis that aid reduces external competitiveness in developing countries. A possible reason for this finding is the existence of large idle labour capacity that prevents the real exchange rate from appreciating.     

Finance and Demand for Skill: Evidence from Uganda

We explore the empirical interaction between firm growth, financing constraints, and job creation. Using a novel small-business survey from Uganda, we find that the extent to which small businesses expand skilled employment as their sales and profits increase is significantly related to access to external funding, while the hiring of casual and family workers is not. The results are robust to the inclusion of various firm level controls, region and sector fixed effects. We support our findings by providing empirical evidence on the relationship between planned hiring and firms’ access to finance.     

Economic Transformation Outside the Law: Corruption,Trust in Public Institutions and the Informal Economy in Transition Countries of Central and Eastern Europe

This article considers the role of the informal economy in Central and Eastern European post-communist countries. The informal economy is defined as the ‘black’ economy, which is monetised but outside the law (often illegal) on the one hand and the ‘household’ and ‘social’ economies which are non-monetised and non-legal in the sense that they are outside of legislation. The article shows that in some countries the black economy is very important for supporting household incomes (Serbia and Croatia) and in other countries the household or social economies are predominant (especially Romania and Ukraine). In a third group of countries the formal economy predominates over other economies (especially the Czech Republic and Hungary). The article goes on to look at what kinds of people participate in these different economies and concludes that whilst the household and social economies are a social safety net for the poor, the elderly and those in rural areas, the black economy is more likely to be an option for those who are already better off to improve their incomes. The article considers the implications of this for attitudes to the legitimacy of the public realm and finds that greater participation in the informal economy is associated with both loss of trust in public institutions and increased perception of corruption. Therefore it is hypothesised that economic activities that take place ‘outside the law’ could lead to a decline in confidence in the state, although there are important variations between countries.     

Armed opposition groups into political parties: Comparing Bosnia,Kosovo, and Mozambique

Since the end of the Cold War, the overwhelming majority of negotiated peace settlements have been premised on the establishment of competitive, multiparty politics. The success of such settlements depends in turn on the degree to which the warring parties can make the adjustment from battlefield to political arena. This article addresses the question of how armed opposition groups are transformed into functional civilian political parties in the aftermath of civil conflict. It argues that the character and degree of commitment such parties make to the post-war political settlement depends on the kinds of challenges that adaptation to the settlement presents for them, as organizations. This article examines the cases of the Kosovo Liberation Army, the Croatian Democratic Union, and the Serbian Democratic Party in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Renamo (Mozambique National Resistance Movement) in Mozambique. Carrie Manning is assistant professor of political science at Georgia State University. Her book,The Politics of Peace in Mozambique: Post-Conflict Democratization, 1992–2000 (Praeger), appeared in 2002.     

Political Competition and Local Social Spending: Evidence from Brazil

Electoral theories of democracy imply electoral competition insures accountability. Using data on local elections, socioeconomic factors, and municipal budgets from more than 5,000 municipalities in Brazil for the years 1996, 2000, and 2004, we find that municipalities with more competitive elections allocate less to social spending compared to municipalities with little political competition. We argue that previous theory on political competition and public goods obscures the critical role that financial resources play in shaping the dynamics of social spending and political competition. Municipalities with small budgets lack the resources necessary to engineer convincing electoral victories. Where resources are negligible, voter turnout is low, and incumbents rarely win reelection. Incumbent parties in municipalities with large financial resources win big. Armed with adequate resources, incumbent parties mobilize voters and win by large margins. This new argument and evidence reconcile contradictory findings in the existing literature on competition and public goods.     

Geostrategic Interest and Democracy Promotion: Evidence from Post-Soviet Space

To become successful, the American policy of promoting democracy abroad needs to be scaled down and decoupled from geopolitics. In the post-Soviet world, the democracy–geopolitics doublespeak breeds cynicism and achieves mixed results at best. Particularly discouraging are the outcomes of democracy promotion in the so-called cleft countries, straddled by a cultural divide. In Ukraine, American foreign policy achieved some success at the price of intensifying inter-regional antagonisms, which subsequently compromised and offset the progress that had been achieved in democratic forms of governance. In Belarus, democracy promotion failed altogether because inter-regional antagonisms in that country are too modest and are therefore difficult to leverage.     

Bride Price and Fertility Decisions: Evidence from Rural Senegal

This paper provides evidence about the relationship between bride price payments and fertility decisions in Senegal. Higher bride price payments reduce the fertility pressure for women with results being robust to confounding socio-economic and contextual factors. The fertility-reducing impact is greater for women who are economically dependent on their husbands. In polygamous households and for arranged marriages, a lower bride price increases fertility pressure while in monogamous households and for non-arranged marriages, the bride price does not affect fertility. As bride price payments have less power over (economically) independent women, empowerment will give leeway to girls in traditional societies.     

Social Capital and Access to Credit: Evidence from Uganda

We use a nationally representative survey in Uganda to study the links between social capital and financial access. Our results indicate a positive association between individual social capital and access to institutional credit, but no significant relationship between generalised trust and credit access. The effect of individual social capital is more pronounced for poorer people, in rural areas, and in areas where generalised trust is low. Individual social capital seems to promote access especially to semiformal and informal financial institutions.     

The Contradictory Effects of Ideology on Jihadist War-Fighting: The Bosnia Precedent

This article examines the manifestation of jihadist ideology in the strategic thought and behavior of war-fighting forces. Employing the “strategic approach,” it aims to determine whether jihadist ideology is a military asset or a strategic disadvantage for armed forces. It hypothesizes the impact of jihadist ideology on the use of force by examining its potential effects in seven strategic aspects: vision, threat perception, objectives, strategy, constituency, legitimacy, and conduct. It concludes by discussing the contradictory effects of jihadist ideology on the utility of force. Theoretical arguments throughout the article are elaborated by a discussion of jihadist forces in the Bosnian civil war.