Search

Begin New Search Content Type Working Paper

1941. Can Indigenous Associations Foster Trust, Tolerance, and Public Goods? Exploring the Role of Grins in Post-Conflict Mali

Author:
Jaimie Bleck and Philippe LeMay-Boucher
Publication Date:
04-2017
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Institute of International Education
Abstract:
People gather in structured, if informal, community groups for many reasons—social, such as a book club or softball league; economic, such as a team hosting a fundraiser for a member’s medical expenses; or political, such as neighbors meeting to address flooding caused by poor infrastructure. But how does participating in such groups affect people’s well-being or decisions to work for other community improvements? Level of political knowledge? Level of trust toward group members, people in the broader community, or institutions such as the government? Or willingness to tolerate differences that are often at the root of conflict, such as ethnicity and religion? Through an Innovation and Research Grant funded by USAID’s Center of Excellence on Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance under the Democracy Fellows and Grants Program, Professors Jaimie Bleck from the University of Notre Dame and Philippe LeMay-Boucher from Heriot-Watt University, in collaboration with Jacopo Bonan from Catholic University of the Sacred Heart and Bassirou Sarr from the Paris School of Economics, worked to answer these questions by studying community groups called grins that meet in neighborhoods across Mali’s cities. The research, which included both survey data and data generated through the public goods and trust experimental games, was implemented in two sites in Mali: the capital Bamako and the twin cities of Mopti and Sevare, on the border between the formerly occupied north and the south. Key findings include: Grins’ primary purpose is social, but the groups also help members meet economic needs and provide a venue for political discussion and community service, such as neighborhood cleanup. The majority of grins are male-only, and the majority of grin members are male, comparatively better educated, and unmarried; however, members of male-only grins trusted one another less than members of mixed-gender or female-only grins. Members are better able to produce public goods than non-members, but only when working with members of their own grin. Members are considered more trustworthy than non-members, except for grins with internally displaced persons as members. Grinmembers had more trust in social institutions and diverse ethnic groups, though no more trust of the government; members of ethnically homogenous grins trusted diverse ethnic groups less.
Topic:
Politics, Ethnicity, Conflict, Institutions, and Indigenous
Political Geography:
Africa and Mali

1942. Does Women’s Political Presence Matter? Examining the Effects of Descriptive Representation on Symbolic Representation in Uruguay

Author:
Kim Fridkin, Magda Hinojosa, and Miki Kittilson
Publication Date:
03-2017
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Institute of International Education
Abstract:
The ASU research team studied how women’s descriptive, substantive, and symbolic political representation is affected by legislation that establishes quotas for the number of women serving in parliament. The team conducted their research in Uruguay, taking advantage of a five-year lag between when the gender quota law was passed (2009) and the elections for which it was first implemented (October 2014) to conduct a natural experiment on the law’s effects, independent of those attributed to its drafting and passage. The ASU team implemented a two-wave survey, before and after quota implementation, and compared those survey results to content analyses of election coverage, legislators’ floor speeches and websites, and bill sponsorship.
Topic:
Gender Issues, Politics, Women, and Representation
Political Geography:
South America and Uruguay

1943. Increasing the Civic and Political Participation of Women: Understanding the Risk of Strong Resistance

Author:
Vanessa Ochs, Denise Walsh, Swati Chawla, Dannah Dennis, Paromita Sen, and Catalina Vallejo
Publication Date:
03-2017
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Institute of International Education
Abstract:
In 2016, USAID’s Center of Excellence on Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance launched its Learning Agenda—a set of research questions designed to address the issues that confront staff in USAID field offices working on the intersection of development and democracy, human rights, and governance. This literature review—produced by a team of UVA professors and graduate students representing the academic disciplines of anthropology, history, political science, religious studies, and sociology—synthesizes scholarship from diverse research traditions on the following Learning Agenda question: What are the most effective ways to encourage women’s civic (e.g., volunteer, advocacy, etc.) and political (e.g., voting, running for office) participation? What are the risks to women of these strategies in contexts where resistance to changing gender norms is strong? Building on an ODI report, “Women’s Voice and Leadership in Decision-Making: Assessing the Evidence” (2015) that identified seven strategies to support women’s civic and political representation, the UVA team focused on the second half of the research question, using a flexible systematic review process that included defining and operationalizing strong resistance. Overall, the team found that 1) research on resistance that aims to limit or end challenges to the status quo is under-theorized and in need of concept-building before researchers can make the analytical distinctions necessary to assess resistance fully and 2) where the literature does exist, it has an almost exclusive focus on female politicians. With these limitations in mind, key findings include: Resistance—which may include physical and sexual violence; social and familial censure; ostracization by the religious community; and various overt or subtle forms of restriction, deprivation, and exclusion—varies according to multiple factors, including by not limited to gender norms, the broader cultural context, regime type, local power structures, economic opportunities, and the form of participation sought. All women do not experience the same levels of risk, and are not vulnerable to the same types of resistance. For example, even within a single socio-cultural context, women who are marginalized (economically, racially, linguistically, religiously, or otherwise) are likely to bear greater burdens of risk. Strong resistance in response to the seven strategies identified in the ODI report is not pervasive but does occur, and that it can discourage women’s participation. Low to moderate resistance is ubiquitous, but generally has less deleterious effects. Sites where strong resistance occurs vary within countries and even among local areas within a single country, suggesting that a country-level analysis of gender norms is inadequate and ineffective for assessing and understanding women’s risk of strong resistance. The implications of these findings are that practitioner risk assessments should be: Routine and done prior to engaging in any intervention, and require information extending far beyond local gender norms. Focused on low to moderate forms of resistance in situations of backlash, and attentive to the possibility of strong resistance in situations of entrenched resistance. Designed for the specific site where the intervention occurs, while remaining attentive to national- and individual-level factors that shape resistance.
Topic:
Politics, Women, Gender Based Violence, and Participation
Political Geography:
North America and Global Focus

1944. Combatting Corruption Among Civil Servants: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on What Works

Author:
Jordan Gans-Morse, Monica Prasad, Mariana Borges, Alexey Makarin, Theresa Mannah-Blankson, Andre Nickow, Vanessa Watters, and Dong Zhang
Publication Date:
02-2017
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Institute of International Education
Abstract:
In 2016, USAID’s Center of Excellence on Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance launched its Learning Agenda—a set of research questions designed to address the issues that confront staff in USAID field offices working on the intersection of development and democracy, human rights, and governance. This literature review—produced by a team of economists, political scientists, sociologists, and anthropologists—synthesizes scholarship from diverse research traditions on the following Learning Agenda question: In the context of hiring civil servants and providing positive and negative incentives for their behavior, what kinds of interventions are most effective at reducing the propensity (potential and actual) of civil servants to engage in corruption? Overall, as summarized in the chart below, there was not a great deal of rigorous academic evidence either for or against the majority of commonly prescribed anti-corruption strategies, with the partial exception of anti-corruption audits and e-governance. These findings are discussed at length in the publication, and contextualized within a broader analysis why the first wave of corruption reforms has generated so few success stories.
Topic:
Corruption, Bureaucracy, and USAID
Political Geography:
Global Focus and North America

1945. Struggles from Below: Literature Review on Human Rights Struggles by Domestic Actors

Author:
Erica Chenoweth, Tricia Olsen, Kyleanne Hunter, Pauline Moore, Jonathan Pinckney, and Heidi Reynolds-Stenson
Publication Date:
02-2017
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Institute of International Education
Abstract:
In 2016, USAID’s Center of Excellence on Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance launched its Learning Agenda—a set of research questions designed to address the issues that confront staff in USAID field offices working on the intersection of development and democracy, human rights, and governance. This literature review—produced by a multidisciplinary team of graduate students and professors—synthesizes scholarship from diverse research traditions on the following Learning Agenda question: What do we know about the role of citizens, social movements, and other domestic civic actors (as opposed to transnational actors or government officials) in advocating for particular human rights outcomes in their country? And what can we learn from the successes and failures of their activities? Much of the research on this topic has focused on North America and Europe, but do any of these findings have the potential to translate to other country contexts? Are there particular contextual or tactical variables in these country contexts that make it less likely that domestic civic actors can have an impact? Are there some kinds of rights that are easier to fight for than others? Key findings include: Context matters: democratic political systems allow grassroots human rights activists more opportunities and greater likelihood of success; extreme poverty makes grassroots mobilization harder. Rhetorical framing matters a lot, and is tricky: local activists can be more successful by framing their work as a human rights struggle and by positioning that struggle within broader international conceptualizations of human rights, as captured in founding international human rights documents. However, activists must take equal care to translate these concepts into frames that resonate locally and are culturally appropriate. Connections matter: activists are more successful if they build connections with each other—within a particular rights movement and across rights movements, within a country and across countries—and if they build connections to political and economic elites and to a broad constituency base. These vertical, horizontal, and transnational ties can be supported simply by bringing activists together, but also depend on framing, since framing is crucial to how activists see themselves and their peers, how they engage their base, and how they target elites. Organizational structure matters, but there is not an ideal type of organization that consistently is more successful in advocating for improved human rights; rather, organizational type, formality, and complexity depends on the right being fought for, the goals of the rights movement, and contextual factors such as regime type or level of repression. Tactics matter: activists must use tactics that are appropriate to their rights fight and to their context, and often use many different tactics at different times. However, confrontational and disruptive tactics—such as protests or boycotts—are often more effective.
Topic:
Human Rights, Social Movement, Democracy, and USAID
Political Geography:
Global Focus

1946. What Determined 2015 TPA Voting Pattern?: The Role of Trade Negotiating Objectives

Author:
Yeo Joon Yoon and Woong Lee
Publication Date:
12-2017
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Korea Institute for International Economic Policy (KIEP)
Abstract:
This paper analyzes 2015-TPA voting patterns in the Congress in the context of the trade negotiating objectives. By setting the trade negotiating objectives, the Congress lays out important trade agenda that the Administration is ex-pected to address when it is negotiating trade deals with foreign countries. Therefore setting the objectives is subject of heated debates in the Congress and an important part of TPA. LPM and probit models are used to evaluate the importance of each trade negotiating objectives in 2015-TPA voting deci-sions. It turns out that the objective on promoting U.S. agricultural exports by reducing unfair trade barriers positively affected the voting decision in favor of the TPA. The objective on enforcing strong labor standards on trade partners also had significant impacts. One other notable result is that how much each congressional region export to China was also an important de-terminant. This variable is meant to capture several negotiating objectives as well as growing worries of large trade deficits with China. This study docu-ments important issues that U.S. Congress is concerned about in making conducting and implementing trade policies. It may provide insights into the future course of U.S. trade policy and trade deals such as renegotiation of NAFTA and Korea-US FTA.
Topic:
Treaties and Agreements, NAFTA, Voting, and Trade
Political Geography:
Asia, South Korea, North America, and United States of America

1947. Empirical Assessment of Trade Engagements: Africa, China and the Maritime Belt and Road Initiative

Author:
Igbinoba Emmanuel
Publication Date:
12-2017
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Korea Institute for International Economic Policy (KIEP)
Abstract:
Recent development economic literatures theorize that South-South trade and foreign investment may have a larger impact on economic growth in devel-oping economies than North-South trade and investment, since investors from the South are more familiar with local developing markets and business practices, which increases their productivity spillovers (Aykut and Goldstein 2007). Amighini and Sanfilippo (2014) provided evidence that South-South trade and investments stimulate product diversification in light manufacturing industries such as agro-processing, plastic, textile and leather production. The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) launched in 2013, aims to create economic opportunities as well as improve and establish new trading routes between China and connected regions. This paper attempts to evaluate the degree of trade relations between China and selected African countries along the Mari-time Silk Route (MSR) and further appraise the trade potentials and gains in-herent for African economies through the initiative. To achieve our objective, we apply quantitative techniques in trade evaluation to enable us explore and estimate the degree and intensity of trade engagements amongst selected Si-no-African silk route countries, identify the trade opportunities and potentials, which are critical for increased trade engagements between both parties along the route and to explore some of the channels through which the maritime route can impact on investment, trade and economic growth in Africa. Findings from the analysis indicate that while the degree of trade integration is unbalanced and favourable to China relative to Africa, the trade pattern and structure are observed to be more complementary than competitive, and this provides Africa with ample opportunity to engage in product upgrading and diversification, critical for structural transformation.
Topic:
Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), Economic Policy, and Trade
Political Geography:
Africa and China

1948. Ecommerce and Firm Performance: Evidence from Korea

Author:
Kyu Yub Lee
Publication Date:
12-2017
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Korea Institute for International Economic Policy (KIEP)
Abstract:
Official estimates peg global business-to-business ecommerce at 15 trillion dollars and global business-to-consumer ecommerce at 1.2 trillion dollars in 2013 (UNCTAD 2015). When we turn to official estimates for Korea, it is easy to find that Korea’s business-to-consumer ecommerce market is grow-ing at more than twenty percent per year and has emerged as the third larg-est global ecommerce market in Asia. It is not very much surprising to know the numbers for Korea since Korea is one of the world’s most ad-vanced countries in terms of information and communication technology. However, it is somewhat surprising that we know little about how ecom-merce firms or establishments are distributed in the economy of Korea. In addition, we know little about how ecommerce establishments perform relative to their counterparts of a similar age and size in the same industry. The paper aims to characterize and test performance differences between ecommerce and non-ecommerce firms or establishments. Although the number of ecommerce establishments makes up a small fraction of the economy, ecommerce establishments have a heavier weight in sales, em-ployment, and wage. Due to endogeneity of ecommerce variable, the paper reconstructs the 2010 Korea Census dataset by using Propensity Matching Score and shows that in manufacture ecommerce establishments have, on average, larger sales-per-worker and pay higher wage whereas in services ecommerce ones have higher sales-per-worker but pay no larger wage than their counterparts of a similar age and size in the same industry. It also adds quantile estimates showing that sales-per-worker differences between ecommerce and non-ecommerce establishments in manufacture are positive and statistically significant only at lower quantiles of the distribution. In ser-vices, sales-per-worker differences between them are positive and signifi-cant at most of distribution but turns to be negative, though not significant, at above upper quantile of the distribution.
Topic:
Science and Technology, Labor Issues, and Economic Policy
Political Geography:
Asia and South Korea

1949. The Impact of Trade Liberalization in Africa

Author:
Jae Wook Jung
Publication Date:
11-2017
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Korea Institute for International Economic Policy (KIEP)
Abstract:
Africa is one of the most economic-integrated continents by a number of regional trade agreements in the continent. There are about 30 bilateral and multilateral trade agreements within the continents so that each African coun-try is a member of at least one regional trade agreement. Trade between Afri-can countries, however, barely exceeds 10% of the total trade of Africa, which is much lower than other continents’ intra-regional trade share. This discrepancy between many regional trade agreements and small intra-continent trade share tells that regional economic integrations in Africa are very unsuccessful trade liberalization policies to promote trade. This paper examines a reason why trade liberalization policies in Africa fail. In particular, we investigate the impact of trade agreements in Africa on trade conditional on financial market development and political instability. An empirical study finds that Africa countries’ poor financial market accessibility and political instability are key barriers to trade integration in the region. These two factors can explain most disadvantage of African countries in their intra-regional trade. In a dynamic regression, the two factors depress the long-run growth of trade due to trade liberalization in the region significantly, while African continent dummy variable that captures other unobserved trade obstacles in the region has much less effect on trade compared to the literature on African regional economic integration.
Topic:
Markets, Treaties and Agreements, Economic Policy, and Trade Liberalization
Political Geography:
Africa and South Korea

1950. Climate Policy And Finance

Author:
Precious Chukwuemelie Akanonu
Publication Date:
07-2017
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Centre for the Study of the Economies of Africa (CSEA)
Abstract:
Carbon pricing has been recognized not only as the most efficient economic policy instruments to internalize the social cost of emissions, but also as a major tool to generate public revenues that can be used to offset the potential adverse distributional effects of climate policy. However, in many developing countries, there is a widespread reluctance to commit to climate policy, largely due to financial constraints, a lack of public support, and concern over its regressive effects.This paper makes recommendations towards the design of an effective carbon pricing system that not only discourages air pollution but also encourages the gradual uptake of climate-friendly technologies by the private sector in Nigeria’s oil and gas sector, while supporting public investment in sustainable infrastructures and projects that offset the distributional effect of the climate policy.
Topic:
Climate Change, Environment, Finance, Climate Finance, and Economic Policy
Political Geography:
Africa and Nigeria