Suchergebnisse

Abstract
We argue for viewing COVID-19 as an additional instance of bioeconomic interaction in an ongoing history of human relations with the rest of nature. We assert that COVID-19 and other increasingly frequent zoonotic pandemic diseases are a further example of global public bads (GPBs), which are collectively provoking the transition from an extensive to an intensive economic growth model characterized by the provision of corresponding global public goods (GPGs) and sigmoid growth. We describe how these dynamics map on to the classic production–predation dichotomy of peace and conflict economics and call for that dichotomy to be extended to the relationship between the human and nonhuman worlds. Finally, we argue that peace economists are particularly well-positioned to extend their research to diagnose human–nonhuman peace and conflict.

AbstractMozambique's post-conflict development has recently focused on the promise of biofuels production, and the Government of Mozambique has accordingly made hundreds of agricultural concessions to foreign and domestic corporations since 2006. In response, local groups have sought community land grants to protect livelihoods. We seek to understand whether the magnitude and recentness of violent events during Mozambique's 16-year civil war determined the success of communities' efforts to secure lands. We hypothesize that violence weakens the ability of communities to protect their traditional land uses from concessions by lobbying for community land grants. This hypothesis - dubbed the "weak institutions hypothesis" - is contrasted with the idea that violence galvanizes political participation. We test the hypothesis using GIS-generated data at the district level on recognized community landholdings and civil war events. Controlling for factors such as market access, road distance to grain warehouses, and spatial auto-correlation, we find that more intense violence is possibly (but not significantly) associated with more land grants, and that districts experiencing more recent violence are actually more likely to lobby successfully for land grants - lending support to the idea that violence boosts community use of riskpooling institutions.

Nigeria's ethnically and religiously diverse Middle Belt has experienced recurrent eruptions of violence over the past several decades. Disputes between pastoralists and farmers arise from disagreements over access to farmland, grazing areas, stock routes, and water points for both animals and households. Although relatively low in intensity, this form of violence is widespread, persistent, and arguably increasing in its incidence. This study seeks to answer the question: How has farmer-pastoralist conflict affected state internally-generated revenues (IGR)? The literature on the effect of violence on sub-national fiscal capacity is slim to none. We use a synthetic control approach to model how IGR for four conflict-affected states – Benue, Kaduna, Nasarawa, and Plateau – would have developed in the absence of violence. To account for the endogeneity criticism commonly leveled at such synthetic control analyses, we then use a fixed-effects IV model to estimate IGR losses predicted by the synthetic control analysis as a function of farmer-pastoralist fatalities. Our conservative estimates for percentage reduction to annual state IGR growth for the four states are 0%, 1.2%, 2.6%, and 12.1% respectively, implying that IGR is likely much more sensitive to conflict than GDP. In total, the four study states of Benue, Kaduna, Nasarawa, and Plateau are estimated to have lost between US$719,000 and US$2.3 million in 2010 US dollars, or 22–47% of their potential IGR collection during the period of intense.

This article reports on the potential macroeconomic benefits of peace stemming from a reduction in farmer-pastoralist violence in four Middle Belt states of Nigeria (Benue, Kaduna, Nasarawa, and Plateau). Farmers and pastoralists routinely clash over access to farmland, grazing areas, stock routes, and water points for both animals and households. Farmer-pastoralist violence in these states is a relatively low-intensity form of conflict, but it is regionally widespread and chronic, and its incidence is arguably increasing. Using estimates of potential income benefits of peace at the household-level derived from a related study, we herein derive macroeconomic benefits via an input-output model of the Nigerian economy. We estimate these benefits to amount to around 2.8 percent of the nominal Nigerian GDP (or around 0.8 percent of the total Nigerian GDP, inclusive of the informal sector), representing a major macroeconomic opportunity. We break out these benefits by sector, showing that the sectors that stand to gain most from peace are the crop production, food and beverage, livestock, and chemical and petroleum industries. [JEL codes: C65, D74, E01]