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Using an experimental approach, this paper examines how scarcity of natural resources affects people's readiness to cooperate or engage in antisocial behavior. The experiments were carried out with pastoralists from southern Namibia, whose livelihoods greatly depend on grazing availability on collectively used rangelands. We split the study region into two areas according to exogenous differences in biomass production (a high-yield and a low-yield area) and conducted a one-shot public goods experiment and a joy-of-destruction experiment with pastoralists from both areas. Results from the joy-of-destruction experiment reveal that a substantial proportion of people are willing to reduce another subject's income, although this comes at a personal cost. We show that this kind of spiteful behavior occurs twice as often in the area where resources are scarcer and hence competitive pressure is higher. By contrast, levels of cooperation are very similar across areas. This indicates that scarcity does not hamper cooperation, at least as long as a subsurvival level has not been exceeded. Our data further reveal a coexistence of prosocial and antisocial behavior within individuals, suggesting that people's motivations depend on the experimental environment they are acting in. One possible explanation is that subjects are ready to cooperate when substantial net gains can be realized, but turn into spiteful money burners when there is no scope for efficiency improvements and the risk of "falling behind" is particularly salient.

Until recently, academia has largely neglected the impact of religion on sustainable development. However, empirical studies have shown that religion remains important in many societies and that its importance has been increasing since the beginning of the new millennium. This paper reviews the empirical quantitative literature on the effect of religion on development from the last decade. We start by disaggregating the concepts of religion and sustainable development into four religious and three developmental dimensions and proposing a framework to identify causal mechanisms. Numerous mechanisms are possible, and this complexity explains why only a few uncontested findings exist. Religion is ambivalent vis‐à‐vis development: although religious dimensions exert a positive influence on physical and mental health as well as on general well‐being, scholars have found a negative relationship between religious dimensions and both income and gender equality. Studies agree that the dominance of one religious group together with parallel ethnic and religious cleavages increases the risk of conflict, while studies on the pro‐peace effects of religious factors are largely missing. Methodological challenges relate to the availability of fine‐grained data, especially for non‐Western countries, and the use of concepts and definitions. Most importantly, the study of religion and development requires methods that allow for causal inference.

2016 was the deadliest year for migrants crossing the Mediterranean; more than 4,800 people died on their way to Europe, despite the fact that fewer attempted the journey than in previous years.
While European migration policies tend to be fragmented, there has been a shift to stepping up a "Fortress Europe" approach. But closing borders won't work in the long run.
Curbing illegal migration and sealing borders will not stop migration from occurring, but rather improve the business of traffickers and make migrants' journeys more dangerous.
A year ago, more than 60 heads of states and government met in Malta for the first summit between the European Union (EU) and the African Union (AU) solely dedicated to the topic of migration. Contrary to initial hopes, the Action Plan and Political Declaration that were agreed upon did not make a significant difference to previous EU policies on migration, which tend to be broad and vague.
The EU approach does not take account of the reality of migration, as we have recently pointed out. Nine out of ten international refugees remain in the Global South. And the main burden of the refugee crisis is not in Europe, but among the poorest countries in the world.

We examine the effectiveness of three democratically chosen rules that alleviate the coordination and cooperation problems inherent in collectively managed common-pool resources. In particular we investigate how rule effectiveness and rule compliance depends on the prevailing local norms and ecological values held by resource users. For this purpose, we employ a framed field experiment that is based on a rangeland model for semi-arid regions and carried out with communal farmers in Namibia and South Africa. Participants could vote for three 'best practice' management rules found in many places around the world that are discussed for implementation in the study area: (temporary) private property rights, rotational grazing or limitation of livestock numbers. All rules were designed in a way that facilitated cooperation or coordination of actions. The focus of this study lies on the interactions between these rules and prevalent ecological norms exhibited in the rounds prior to rule implementation. In contrast to previous lab experimental studies, we find that democratic voting of rules is not sufficient for high rule compliance and an overall enhancement in cooperation. Rules turned out to be inefficient if they were in conflict with the prevalent ecological norm.

The paper reports on a series of field experiments based on a non-standard common-pool resource model and carried out with communal farmers in southern Africa. We frame an experimental design used by Cardenas et al. (2008) in Thailand and Colombia according to the grazing situation in semi-arid regions. We analyse the efficiency of two simple, imperfectly enforced property-rights mechanisms that base on both, informal realworld arrangements practised in the communal areas as well as on the procedure pursued by the Namibian government, where mostly those farmers with big herd sizes get granted access to resettlement farms. Our results suggest that in the short run, the introduction of property rights increases the economic returns and has positive ecological effects, but that these effects diminish in the long-run if imperfectly enforced. It further seems that players' propensity to co-operate is constant across the experiment: farmers who behave less co-operatively in an open access situation do so as well when they get granted exclusive property rights.

Contrary to the expectations of secularization theory, religion remains socially important and affects politics in multiple ways - especially regarding conflict between religious communities. Theoretically, religion can increase altruism, but belief in the superiority of one's faith may facilitate intergroup discrimination and related conflict. Previous findings remain inconclusive, however, as specific religious ideas have hardly been tested. In this article, we argue that the content of religious ideas has causal effects on intergroup discrimination. We hence test the impact of two opposing, prominent religious ideas on altruism and discrimination: universal love and the notion of one true religion. Conducting dictator games with Christians and Muslims in Ghana and Tanzania, we find causal effects: Whereas the idea of one true religion increases intergroup discrimination, that of universal love fosters equal treatment. The policy implications hereof are obvious - promoting tolerant religious ideas seems crucial to avoiding conflict.

ResumenLos indicadores actuales de los ODM sobre empleo presentan deficiencias importantes, como problemas de medición, uso inadecuado de estadísticas agregadas, ambigüedad interpretativa y supuestos de base no aplicables a los países en desarrollo. Tratando de superar estos problemas, los autores proponen cuatro nuevos indicadores de empleo productivo y trabajo decente: el crecimiento de la contribución del trabajo al valor añadido por trabajador, la tasa de trabajadores pobres y los porcentajes de trabajadores que ganan menos de un ingreso laboral mínimo absoluto y relativo (el 60 por ciento de la mediana del ingreso laboral). Aplican empíricamente estos indicadores a los casos de Uganda y Perú.

AbstractThe MDG employment indicators suffer from major shortcomings, including measurement problems, inappropriate use of aggregate statistics, ambiguous interpretability, and assumptions that do not apply to developing countries. Based on this critique, the authors propose a new set of four indicators for productive employment and decent work, namely: the growth of labour value added per worker, the working poverty rate, the share of workers receiving less than an absolute minimum labour income, and the share of workers receiving less than 60 per cent of the median labour income. They demonstrate the empirical application of these indicators using the country cases of Uganda and Peru.

RésuméLes indicateurs associés aux objectifs du Millénaire pour le développement présentent plusieurs lacunes: des problèmes de mesure et d'interprétation, l'utilisation de données agrégées et des hypothèses inadaptées aux pays en développement. Les auteurs proposent par conséquent quatre nouveaux indicateurs de l'emploi productif et du travail décent: l'augmentation de la part du travail dans la valeur ajoutée par těte, le taux de travailleurs pauvres et la proportion de travailleurs qui perçoivent un revenu inférieur à un minimum donné, fixé en valeur absolue d'abord puis à 60 pour cent du revenu du travail médian. Deux cas d'espèce – Ouganda et Pérou – illustrent l'application pratique de ces indicateurs.