Suchergebnisse

Why did some countries decline to condemn Russia's invasion of Ukraine at the United Nations General Assembly's first emergency session since 1997? Our research investigates the various economic, military, political, geographic, and historical factors that may have influenced the voting behavior of these countries in favor of Russia. Our Probit regressions reveal that the probability of voting in favor of Russia is significantly and robustly higher in countries that have defense cooperation agreements with Russia, have a longer history of leftist governments, are major recipients of Russian aid, have political similarities with Russia, and have no history of war with the Soviet Union.

AbstractIn this study, we look at how oil price shocks affect the incidence of protests in a country and how the size of a country's shadow economy influences this relationship. Using panel data from 144 countries, from the period of 1991–2015, we find evidence that negative oil price shocks significantly increase protests in countries with small shadow economies. The effect dissipates as the size of the shadow economy increases and eventually vanishes in countries with a shadow economy representing more than 35% of gross domestic product. Our analysis departs from existing literature by emphasizing the moderating role of a shadow economy on the effects of negative oil shocks on the incidence of protests in oil‐dependent economies. The results are robust to various specifications and their broader implications are discussed.

In this study, we look at the association between COVID-19 fatality rate and internal conflict, highlighting the importance of government economic support under the pandemic as a moderating factor. Our main hypothesis implies that increased COVID-19 fatality rates are likely to be positively associated with internal conflict in countries with lower levels of government economic support. Our empirical analysis confirms this prediction: employing cross-country data for more than 100 countries, the estimation results demonstrate that the positive effect of COVID-19 fatality rates on internal conflict may become insignificant with higher levels of government economic support. In countries where government spending in response to the pandemic is less than 5 to 6% of GDP, there is a significant risk of internal conflict resulting from increased COVID-19 fatality rates. Our main findings hold when we control for the effects of other socio-economic determinants relating to pre-pandemic internal political stability and alternative measures of conflict.

There is significant cross-country variation in Covid-19 fatalities worldwide. In this study, we analyze the relationship between political trust and fatalities of the Covid-19 pandemic. By performing a cross-country analysis and controlling for other determinants, we find that government trust is negatively associated with Covid-19 cases and deaths. Additionally, our findings suggest that risk communication, in the form of public information campaigns, only decreased Covid-19 cases and deaths in countries with high trust in government. We also find evidence that political trust decreases the risk of removing lockdown policies.

Existing research has pointed to the decreasing effect of revolutions and wars on income inequality. It is unclear whether this reduction is the result of ongoing changes within countries before revolutions and wars or if the results are standalone effects. In this study, we focus on the case of the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the subsequent Iran-Iraq war from 1980 to 1988. We use the synthetic control method to study the effect of revolution and war on changes in income inequality levels. Had there been no revolution and war in Iran, how would income inequality have developed? Utilizing the synthetic control method, we created a counterfactual Iran that reproduces the socioeconomic characteristics of Iran before the Islamic revolution. Then we compare the income inequality of the counterfactual Iran, without the revolution and war, to the factual Iran with a new political regime, for the period of 1970-1988. Our results, based on two different indicators of Iran's Gini, show a statistically significant effect of the revolution and war on reducing income inequality. Over the entire 1979–1988 period, on average and per year, the Gini index of Iran was reduced by approximately 3 times of the standard deviation of this index. The main findings are robust to a series of placebo tests.

The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of individuals' memories of the Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988) during early adulthood (18-25 years) on their preference for strong national defense forces and their willingness to fight for Iran (in the event of another war). Using the World Value Survey (WVS) data, we provide evidence that Iranians who experienced the war during early adulthood give top priority to strong defense forces. However, we find that there is no significant association between individuals' memories of the war during early adulthood and their willingness to fight for Iran. The results are robust, controlling for a set of individuals' socio-economic and political characteristics.

This study focuses on short and long-term effects of sanctions on military spending in Iran. Utilizing the annual data from 1960 to 2017 and the auto regressive distributed lag (ARDL) model, we show that the increasing intensity of sanctions dampen the military budget of Iran. By separating unilateral sanctions (where only the United States sanctions Iran) and multilateral sanctions (where, the United States acts in conjunction with other countries to sanction Iran), we show that only the latter class of sanctions have a statistically significant and negative impact on military spending of Iran. The negative effects of the multilateral sanctions on military budget are observed in both the short and long run time horizons. The results remain robust when controlling for other determinants of military spending such as gross domestic product (GDP), oil rents, trade openness, population, quality of political institutions, military expenditure of the Middle East region, non-military spending of government and the war period with Iraq.