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Jobs Drive Development: An interview with Martin Rama15 January 2013Martin Rama from The World bank discusses the process behind the World Development Report 2013 on jobs, which he directed.He emphasises...
15 January 2013Martin Rama from The World bank discusses the process behind the World Development Report 2013 on jobs, which he directed.He emphasises...
Part of Book The New Regionalism and the Future of Security and Development
Previous UNU-WIDER research has shown that the risk of internal conflict is high in low-income societies rich in natural resources and characterised by ethnic fragmentation. Yet for each country in conflict there are many others with similar...
Reconstruction from conflict is a complex and demanding task, and a major challenge for the UN system as well as the wider donor community. National authorities and their donor partners are faced with multiple priorities - rebuilding infrastructure...
The six papers in this Special Issue to provide insights into advances in conceptualizing and measuring vulnerability, in particularly household vulnerability to poverty and country and regional vulnerability to external shocks. All of the papers...
In recent years there is a growing concern within the international donor community regarding the plight of a special group of countries labeled as 'Fragile States'. These states, which according to current donor lists currently numbers more than 40...
Entrepreneurs are often adversely affected by violent conflict such as civil war. At the same time though entrepreneurs may contribute to or even benefit from violent conflict and other ‘destructive’ and ‘unproductive’ activities that limit economic...
Fragile states have very mixed characteristics. Some are experiencing violent conflict, some are ‘post-conflict’, some have avoided large-scale violence–so far. Many are resource poor, but some are resource rich. Many are landlocked, but certainly...
Part of Journal Special Issue Entrepreneurship and Conflict
This study surveys the small but growing field of entrepreneurship and conflict in developing countries, which is also the topic of this special issue of the Journal of Small business and Entrepreneurship. We review recent contributions on how mass...
Sameeksha Desai Across countries, entrepreneurship is shown to support wealth and income generation, job creation and innovations in product and...
Tommaso Ciarli, Saeed Parto and Maria Savona Afghanistan remains one of the poorest countries in the world with an estimated per capita income of 300...
Tony Addison and Tilman Brück There is a special role for entrepreneurship to play in making peace work. The recently published UNU-WIDER study...
Present in India since the 1960s, the Naxalite insurgency has steadily spread across the country. Counterinsurgency measures lagged behind and did not follow any systematic process till the early 2000s with the exception of Andhra Pradesh, which in...
In June 1998, Guinea-Bissau was thrown into conflict by a military revolt. This led to 11 months of fighting, extensive loss of life, and the displacement of up to a third of the country's population. This paper discusses the political economy of the...
Implementing development programmes in conflict-affected areas is crucial for conflict as well as poverty reduction. The big question is how do you...
This paper defines a role for human rights and human rights workers in the discussion of humanitarian emergencies. The approach is to look at how human rights law, monitoring, and information can be useful in two ways: (1) to warn of an impending...
This paper investigates the relationship between criminal activity and geographical isolation. Using data from Madagascar, we show that, after we control for population composition and risk factors, crime increases with distance from urban centers...
This paper uses econometric methods and case-study evidence to examine the political economy of complex humanitarian emergencies, multidimensional crises characterized by warfare, disease, hunger, and displacement. We find that stagnation and decline...
This paper uses econometric methods and case-study evidence to examine the political economy of complex humanitarian emergencies, multidimensional crises characterized by warfare, state violence, disease, hunger, and displacement. We emphasize that...
While much of the literature studies causes and consequences of war, the reverberations of peace have rarely been studied. By focusing on the universe of ceasefire agreements since 1993, we study the causal effect of peace on economic recovery using...
by Tony Addison The period 1990-2000 saw 19 major armed-conflicts in Africa, ranging from civil wars to the 1998-2000 war between Eritrea and Ethiopia...
by Tony Addison The last ten years or so have seen 56 major armed conflicts in 44 different locations, most of them civil wars. Different types of...
by E. Wayne Nafziger and Raimo Väyrynen Since the end of the cold war, civil wars and state violence have escalated, resulting in millions of deaths...
by Francis M. Deng O ver the last decade, the international community has been confronted with the global crisis of internal displacement, involving...
Since the end of the civil war, the Government of Sierra Leone has made substantial progress in strengthening public financial management. Improvements have been achieved across all aspects of the budget cycle and are particularly notable with regard...
The coherence and effectiveness of engagement with the world’s ‘fragile and conflict-affected states’—beyond ethical imperatives and geo-strategic considerations—turns on answers to two vexing questions. First, on what defensible basis is any given...
This special issue has its origins in work conducted under the Governance and Fragility theme of UNU-WIDER’s ReCom - Research and Communication on Foreign Aid programme (2011–13), and particularly the work on ‘Aid and Institution-building in Fragile...
Why are some countries more successful at carrying out post-conflict reconstruction programmes than others? Why has Sierra Leone been more successful in the reform of its armed forces than Liberia has after the end of the Mano River Basin wars? This...
The experience and lessons of the last two decades have shown that ignoring the key differences between the economics of peace and the economics of development has been a major reason why countries relapse into conflict. This paper briefly analyses...
Why do some states, with foreign assistance, transition from ‘fragile’ to ‘robust?’ Scholars in state-building have argued that neotrusteeship is an effective strategy by which external organizations might build post-conflict states. This working...
Since October 2000 Israel and the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza Strip have become entangled in a bloody confrontation. This paper focuses on the economic relationship between the Israeli economy and the Palestinian economy of the West Bank...
This paper models the instability of peace agreements, motivated by the empirical regularity with which peace agreements tend to break down following civil war. When war provides opportunities for profit to one side, or when other difficulties such...
Since the mid-1980s there have been substantial cuts in military spending everywhere except Pacific Asia. The reasons are both political, such as the end of the Cold War, democratization in Africa and Latin America, and economic, with structural...
Reconstruction from conflict is a complex and demanding task, and a major challenge for post-conflict countries as well as the international community. Countries and their donor partners face multiple priorities – rebuilding infrastructure, assisting...
In this lecture Frances Stewart expands on some of the central themes of her studies for WIDER. She documents the ways in which political power, social demarcations and economic differences combine to produce horizontal inequalities between...
Establishing peace and reconstructing Africa's war-damaged economies are urgent challenges. For Africa to recover, communities must reconstruct, private sectors must revitalize, and states must transform themselves. Thus, unless communities rebuild...
Since the mid-1980s there have been substantial cuts in military spending throughout the world, with the exception of Pacific Asia. The end of the Cold War, democratization in Africa and Latin America, structural adjustment programmes, debts and cuts...
Part of Journal Special Issue Civil War in Developing Countries
The northeast region of India remains fraught with severe violence, poor growth and acute frustration among its youth. Success of policies to resolve the region’s crisis has proved less than encouraging. What could be the way out of the violence–poor...
Based on analysing World Bank and other donor post-conflict reconstruction (PCR) loans and grants from rights-based, macroeconomic and microeconomic perspectives, we conclude that few PCR projects identify or address gender discrimination issues...
The UNU-WIDER research programme on foreign aid (ReCom) began in 2010, in a period of strong aid scepticism. Dambisa Moyo’s well-known book, Dead Aid...
Financial development is vulnerable to social conflict. Conflict reduces the demand for domestic currency as a medium of exchange and a store of value. Conflict also leads to poor quality governance, including weak regulation of the financial system...
Can we predict when and where violence will break out within cases of genocide? Given often weak political will to respond, knowing where to strategically prioritize limited resources is valuable information for international decision makers...
by Frances Stewart The number of humanitarian emergencies has been escalating since the early 1990s. Between the early 1980s and the mid-1990s...
by Stephen BrowneEvery ‘conflict country’ is a special case. What distinguishes Rwanda is the intensity of human destruction to which the country...
by Tony Addison War has destroyed the lives and hopes of millions of Africans. It poses major challenges to the United Nations system and to the wider...
Part of Book Advancing Development
Part of Book Fragile States
Part of Book Resource Abundance and Economic Development
This paper analyses the transmission channels through which mass violent conflict and post-conflict fragility affect households. It does so by pointing out how a fragile environment impairs a household’s core functions, boundaries, and its choice of...
This paper models transnational terrorism as a three-way strategic interaction involving a government that faces armed opposition at home, which may spill over in the form of acts of terrorism by the state’s opponents against the government’s...
Part of Journal Special Issue Entrepreneurship and Conflict
Part of Book Making Peace Work
Part of Book Making Peace Work
Part of Book Making Peace Work
Part of Journal Special Issue Vulnerability in Development
Part of Journal Special Issue Small Business, Entrepreneurship, and Violent Conflict in Developing Countries
Part of Journal Special Issue Small Business, Entrepreneurship, and Violent Conflict in Developing Countries
Part of Journal Special Issue Small Business, Entrepreneurship, and Violent Conflict in Developing Countries
Part of Journal Special Issue Small Business, Entrepreneurship, and Violent Conflict in Developing Countries
Conflicts within the Malaysian federation have been rooted in socio-economic disparities and the struggle for control of natural resource rents, which State Governments previously had exclusive control over, as originally provided for by the federal...
Rachel M. Gisselquist There is much to commend in the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) as we approach their target deadline of 2015. In addition to...
This paper assesses the institutional constraints on the effectiveness of the United Nations over the course of its existence, especially in relation to its central mission to promote international peace and security. Only passing attention is...
This paper models transnational terrorism as a three-way strategic interaction involving a government that faces armed opposition at home, which may spill over in the form of acts of terrorism by the state's opponents against the government's...
Part of Book The End of Military Fordism
Part of Book The End of Military Fordism
Small island developing states (SIDS) are characterised by high economic, geographical and social vulnerability. These states are perceived as economically vulnerable, exhibiting poor economic performance, and embedding low levels of achieved well...
Part of Book From Conflict to Recovery in Africa
Part of Book New Wars
Part of Journal Special Issue Conflict and Peace-building
Part of Journal Special Issue Civil War in Developing Countries
Part of Book The Prevention of Humanitarian Emergencies
The first half of the 1990s was a period of great optimism about humanitarian intervention. In the aftermath of the Cold War, it was hoped that the international community could begin to act cohesively in defence of fundamental international...
Part of Book Economic Liberalization: No Panacea
Part of Book The Role of the State in Economic Change
Part of Book The New Regionalism and the Future of Security and Development
Part of Book The New Regionalism and the Future of Security and Development
The first half of the 1990s was a period of great optimism about humanitarian intervention. In the aftermath of the Cold War, it was hoped that the international community could begin to act cohesively in defence of fundamental international...
Jurgen Brauer Military contractors - condottiere - and their men were not welcome anywhere in Renaissance Europe. No one enjoyed the presence of these...
The natural resource sector in Liberia has failed to produce links to other important sectors of the economy, and in particular has failed to create jobs for the large majority of the population. Creating new and productive jobs is key to national...
Part of Journal Special Issue Aid and Institution-Building in Fragile States
30 April 2013 Tony Addison As April closes, our thoughts turn to UNU-WIDER’s spring/summer programme. And it’s a busy one. June sees us back in...
Tony Addison This month saw UNU-WIDER in Stockholm for the ReCom results meeting on ‘aid and the social sectors’, which took place at Sida on 13 March...
Tony Addison We start the new year at a fast pace, preparing for the ReCom results meeting on ‘Aid and the Social Sectors’ in Stockholm on 13th March...
This paper is concerned with the problems of achieving lasting peace. One dimension includes fairly sharing the post-war economic and political pie or the peace dividend. This requires post-war allocations that are envy free. Many peace agreements...
A key issue for development in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has been an escalation of violence during post-conflict transitions. A long-term goal for international donor involvement is to assist in building legitimate and...
The design of policies towards countries where major conflicts have ended is becoming a major issue in the development agenda partly because of the numbers of countries where such policy is relevant and partly because their situation tends to be...
Since existing injustices and the quest for justice are seen to be the main causes for violent clashes, it is often claimed that the restoration of justice must be the most important goal of post-conflict reconstruction. However, the current policy...
Recent attention has focused on the difficulties of establishing ‘coherence’ between humanitarian relief aid in complex emergencies and the objective of ending violent conflict. This paper introduces a parallel problem: absence of total synergy...
Fragile and conflict-affected states, like Sierra Leone, can maintain a strong public financial management structure if they are able to find foreign support for administrative capacity and sufficient domestic political and executive support. PFM...
Part of Journal Special Issue Explaining Violent Conflict
Part of Journal Special Issue Explaining Violent Conflict
30 October 2013 Roger Williamson The UNU-WIDER meeting held last week in New York on the topic of fragility and aid argued forcefully that you cannot...
Part of Journal Special Issue Spatial Issues in Africa
Development assistance to fragile states and conflict-affected areas can be a core component of peacebuilding, providing support for the restoration of government functions, delivery of basic services, the rule of law and economic revitalization...