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Publications (145)
– Ending Poverty While Protecting Nature
BOOK IN PRODUCTION: ESTIMATED PUBLICATION LATE 2024/EARLY 2025
Working Paper
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Companies in the oil, gas, and mining sectors face ever intensifying scrutiny over their environmental, social, and governance (ESG) practices and impacts: from civil society but also from investment funds and other stakeholders with ESG mandates. Companies with good practices—and the paper...
Working Paper
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While market mechanisms and private initiatives can deliver much for development, public action is also necessary to: maximize the economic benefits of the extractive industries; manage potentially large capital and revenues flows; minimize adverse environmental and social impacts; and steer the...
Working Paper
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This paper analyses the roles that states, civil society, and international actors can play in tackling the weak governance that sometimes leads to resources being used for private rather than public benefit. It discusses the corruption that bedevils licensing and commodities trading; and oil theft...
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We show that the Russia–Ukraine-war-induced changes in the international price of wheat affected political violence in Asia. Using data from 13 countries and more than four million cell-level observations, we show that a higher wheat price increases political violence in areas that are more suitable...
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This paper argues for a change in government attitudes to their extractive industries: as enclaves useful primarily as revenue sources. This is too narrow a perspective: it fails to recognize the broader economic linkages that are invariably possible. Achieving greater economic impact requires...
Working Paper
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This paper analyses the risks facing resource-dependent countries. These include: (i) economic mismanagement (the ‘resource curse’); (ii) political mismanagement; (iii) environmental damage (climate change and the destruction of natural capital). It distinguishes ‘risk’ (which can be addressed...
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The extractives industries are highly controversial but remain vitally important in much of the developing world. This paper considers their role in reducing energy poverty and discusses scenarios for the future of the global markets for oil, gas, and metals (emphasizing the increasing importance of...
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This paper leverages a novel panel dataset covering the histories of 306 chiefs and 256 episodes of village governance and taxation by armed groups in 106 villages in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo in order to analyse the relationship between the governance of armed groups and the power of...
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– Challenges and lessons from Ukraine
Collecting public opinion data is challenging in the shadow of war. And yet accurate public opinion is crucial. Political elites rely on it and often attempt to influence it. Therefore, it is incumbent on researchers to provide independent and reliable wartime polls. However, surveying in wartime...
– A closer look
Terrorist violence has a profound influence on social attitudes, including trust in governmental institutions and attitudes towards migration and civil freedoms. Acts of terrorism cause citizens to experience a complex range of negative emotions, including anxiety, anger, sorrow, and a sense of...
Blog
Fragile and least developed countries have had their development assistance cut drastically, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. For instance, net official development assistance to sub-Saharan African countries has shrunk by 7.8% compared to 2021. And...
According to a recent OECD Report, borderlands experience a greater intensity of violence, especially violence targeted against the state. While there is an expanding literature on the causes of civil conflict, we do not yet fully know why state peripheries are more prone to violence. Our research...
Journal Article
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
– Armed violence in post-war Abkhazia
This article examines the complex local dynamics of armed violence in post-war Abkhazia. Drawing on in-depth interviews with the Abkhaz participants and non-participants in this violence and a range of secondary materials, it adapts the conceptual and analytical tools developed in civil war studies...
Journal Article
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
– Measurement and concepts
This study proposes a new measure of Fiscal Dependence on Extractive revenues: FDE. The FDE estimates, simply, the extent to which extractive-producing countries can fund day-to-day government spending with non-extractive revenues.By focusing specifically on the fiscal aspect of dependency - and...
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We examine whether frontier rule, which disallows frontier residents from a recourse to formal institutions of conflict management and disproportionately empowers tribal elites, provides a more fragile basis for maintaining social order in the face of shocks. Combining a historical border separating...
Displaying 16 of 145 results