Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission

Citizens of South Africa are confronting a painful past through the new nation's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, or TRC, which thus far has heard thousands of reports (many televised) about murders, torture, and other human rights abuses that took place during the apartheid era. South Africa's TRC is grounded in a constitutional commitment to the African concept of ubuntu, or humaneness. Amnesty is available on a conditional basis to alleged perpetrators. The author assesses the potential restorative power of truth-telling; the significance of sympathetic witnesses; and the tasks of both perpetrators and bystanders in the TRC process. Aspirations for justice are considered along with restoring dignity to victims, offering a basis for individual healing, and promoting reconciliation of a divided society.     

Analyzing the impact of terrorism on tourism in Sri Lanka

While terrorism brings fear and chaos, tourism is the epitome of peace and happiness. Sri Lanka has always attracted international tourists due to tropical climate and beautiful tourist destinations. However, terrorism and the recent debt crisis have led to chaos and economic failure; in this study, the impact of terrorism, external debt, and military expenditure on international tourism in Sri Lanka have been empirically studied to unravel the dynamics. Dynamic ARDL simulation and cumulative fourier frequency causality results highlight the presence of an inverted N-shaped association between terrorism and tourism, as well as external debt and tourism. The phenomenal results from this analysis provide essential policy suggestions for Sri Lanka for economic recovery through the promotion of international tourism.     

External commercial borrowings by the corporate sector in India

The growing levels of external commercial borrowings (ECBs) among the emerging and developing economies have raised the fears that ECBs would lead to widespread crisis and threaten financial stability in India. Against this backdrop, the current study seeks to examine the trends and critically evaluate the policy pertaining to ECBs. In order to immune the economy from potential exchange rate shocks, we suggest to having specific policy focus on the domestic bond market, hedging mechanisms, and appropriate decisions on the cap and level of ECBs by the regulator.     

A "politically robust" experimental design for public policy evaluation, with application to the Mexican universal health insurance program.

We develop an approach to conducting large-scale randomized public policy experiments intended to be more robust to the political interventions that have ruined some or all parts of many similar previous efforts. Our proposed design is insulated from selection bias in some circumstances even if we lose observations; our inferences can still be unbiased even if politics disrupts any two of the three steps in our analytical procedures; and other empirical checks are available to validate the overall design. We illustrate with a design and empirical validation of an evaluation of the Mexican Seguro Popular de Salud (Universal Health Insurance)program we are conducting. Seguro Popular, which is intended to grow to provide medical care, drugs, preventative services, and financial health protection to the 50 million Mexicans without health insurance, is one of the largest health reforms of any country in the last two decades. The evaluation is also large scale, constituting one of the largest policy experiments to date and what may be the largest randomized health policy experiment ever.