Effect of armed conflicts on humanitarian operations: Total factor productivity and efficiency of rural hospitals

We study an important but widely neglected topic in humanitarian operations: armed conflicts. Specifically, this paper empirically analyzes the effect of armed conflicts on the operational performance of first-layer response organizations. Using as a case study the Colombian conflict we investigate the effect of conflict on public rural hospitals' (i) total factor productivity, (ii) efficiency and (iii) efficiency variability. The panel data set (2007–2011) used in this study includes information at the hospital level for 163 hospitals and qualitative data collected from interviews with medical staff from the Colombian Ministry of Health and hospitals in different conflict zones. Our results indicate that armed conflict has a positive effect on total factor productivity, while it has a negative impact on hospital efficiency, and interestingly that efficiency and total factor productivity both increase in post conflict. Finally, the results show that efficiency variability is higher in peace and post-conflict hospitals and lower in medium and severe-conflict hospitals. These results have operations management implications and opportunities for future research related to sourcing decisions, supply chain and workforce flexibility, behavioral impacts on the workforce, and humanitarian response to conflicts.     

Urban Warfare Ecology: A Study of Water Supply in Basrah

This article assesses the impact of armed conflict on the drinking water service of Basrah from 1978 to 2013 through an ‘urban warfare ecology’ lens in order to draw out the implications for relief programming and relevance to urban studies. It interprets an extensive range of unpublished literature through a frame that incorporates the accumulation of direct and indirect impacts upon the hardware, consumables and people upon which urban services rely. The analysis attributes a step‐wise decline in service quality to the lack of water treatment chemicals, lack of spare parts, and, primarily, an extended ‘brain‐drain’ of qualified water service staff. The service is found to have been vulnerable to dependence upon foreign parts and people, ‘vicious cycles’ of impact, and the politics of aid and of reconstruction. It follows that practitioners and donors eschew ideas of relief–rehabilitation–development (RRD) for an appreciation of the needs particular to complex urban warfare biospheres, where armed conflict and sanctions permeate all aspects of service provision through altered biological and social processes. The urban warfare ecology lens is found to be a useful complement to ‘infrastructural warfare’ research, suggesting the study of protracted armed conflict upon all aspects of urban life be both deepened technically and broadened to other cases.     

The costs of organized violence: a review of the evidence

I critically review recent studies that estimate those costs of violence and conflict that can emerge among organized political groupings, such as states, religious and ethnic organizations, guerillas and paramilitaries. The review includes studies that estimate direct and indirect costs due to internal conflicts (civil wars and other lower-level conflicts), terrorism, and external conflicts, including military spending. There are a number of key theoretical concerns on what counts as a cost, and, depending on the methods and evidence used, estimated costs vary widely. However, even minimum estimates are economically significant, especially for low-income countries. This is even more so when the costs of different types of organized conflict and violence are aggregated.     

SURVEY OF ECONOMIC IMPLICATIONS OF MARITIME AND TERRITORIAL DISPUTES

Drawing on studies on the economics of conflict, this paper reviews the literature on maritime and territorial disputes; and it examines an array of economic implications associated with territorial and maritime disputes. These include adverse effects on certain economic and development outcomes arising from possible armed confrontation, with some of these possibly lingering in the aftermath of conflict. There are also various economic disruptions and costs associated with these disputes, emphasizing how they also affect the livelihoods of resource users in the disputed areas. A clearer understanding of these economic links could help inform and motivate policymakers on mitigating the risks of conflict. Based on the review of evidence herein, the economic implications of conflict in terms of foregone average trade among the country pairs considered in the West Philippine Sea/South China Sea (in 1985 dollars) – which differ in important ways but hint at some common channels of impact – could range from US$ 909.3 million to US$ 98.8 billion. More broadly, the impacts on a disrupted global production chain can easily amplify these results even further, affecting global growth prospects for many decades, according to experience.     

ECONOMIC WELFARE ANALYSIS OF THE LEGALIZATION OF DRUGS: A CGE MICROSIMULATION MODEL FOR COLOMBIA

In this paper, a computable general equilibrium (CGE) microsimulation model is used to analyze the effects of an ex ante legalization of drugs on the Colombian economy. The model consists of 11 productive sectors, 3 different labor force categories with unemployment, and 20 households divided by income and location. Changes in wages and migration are estimated using a labor participation model, and a NIDS estimates the demands of the households. Changes in household economic welfare, measured by changes in income and prices (CV and EV measurements), are very sensitive to the reinvestments that the government makes in the economy. By analyzing six different scenarios with different assumptions about changes in drug prices, investments of the government, and the termination of the armed conflict, the results suggest that economic welfare improves when the government reinvests military expenditures in other productive sectors or when the ‘economy of war’ continues and the legalization does not end the armed conflict.     

Finding Tools to Limit Sectarian Violence in Indonesia: The Relevance of Restorative Justice

This article explores the relevance of the restorative justice paradigm to issues of conflict avoidance and resolution in Indonesia. Sectarian violence engulfed Indonesia in the late 1990s after the fall of the New Order, largely as a result of resource competition and other economic factors. In addition, the revival of customary forms of authority through the national indigenous peoples movement exacerbated the potential for conflict between long‐settled indigenes and more recent migrants. A case study shows how the spread of communal conflict to the Lindu plain in Central Sulawesi was averted despite the sectarian violence in a nearby city. Local customary procedures of adjudication were insufficient to cope with such issues in a multiethnic context, as the ethnic groups in the area did not all subscribe to the same body of custom (adat). Instead, a diverse assembly of stakeholders invoked nationalist idioms of harmony and consensus to forge an agreement to avoid violence. Previous legal theorists have pointed to adat as a preexisting respository of restorative justice practices. However, this article argues that interethnic contexts require restorative practice to forge novel syntheses to deal with communal violence. Such syntheses may incorporate adat mechanisms, but they must also integrate other tools that gain the allegiance of multiple groups to work toward reconciliation and avoidance of further violence.     

A Globalized Conflict: European Anti-Jewish Violence during the Second Intifada

The globalization of the Arab–Israeli conflict during the period of the second intifada against Israel (from the autumn 2000 through at least the spring of 2005) has fostered anti-Jewish violence in Europe and throughout the world. With this globalized conflict as a context, this paper explores the effects of four explanatory factors on counts of anti-Jewish violence in 10 European countries. These factors are the relative sizes of a country’s Jewish and Muslim populations; how interpretations of the events in the Middle East mobilize the perpetrators; the unresponsiveness of bystanders; and the ambivalence of ordinary Europeans. Poisson multilevel models of the effects of these social structural and attitudinal variables suggest that all four factors contribute to violence. The violence counts include major attacks like shootings, knifings, bombings, and arson; and major violent incidents like vandalism and physical aggression without the use of a weapon. The views expressed in this paper are my own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions or policies of any organization to which I may be affiliated. I wish to thank Greg Maney and other reviewers of earlier versions of this paper for their helpful comments and Philip Gibbs of the SAS Institute for clarifying aspects of GLIMMIX.     

Combatant recruitment and the outcome of war

What determines who wins a civil war? We propose a simple model in which the power of each armed group depends on the number of combatants it is able to recruit. This is in turn a function of the relative ‘distance’ between the group leadership and potential recruits. We emphasize the moral hazard problem of recruitment: fighting is costly and risky so combatants have the incentive to defect from their task. They can also desert altogether and join the enemy. This incentive is stronger the farther away the fighter is from the principal, since monitoring becomes increasingly costly. Bigger armies have more power but less monitoring capacity to prevent defection and desertion. This general framework allows a variety of interpretations of what type of proximity matters for building strong cohesive armies ranging from ethnic distance to geographic dispersion. Different assumptions about the distribution of potential fighters along the relevant dimension of conflict lead to different equilibria. We characterize these, discuss the implied outcome in terms of who wins the war, and illustrate with historical and contemporaneous case studies.     

Oil Prices and Personal Consumption Expenditures: Does the Source of the Shock Matter?

This paper studies the effect of structural oil shocks on personal consumption expenditures (PCE). First, we estimate a nonlinear simultaneous equation model, compute impulse responses by Monte Carlo integration, and conduct a test of the symmetry of the impulse response functions. We find that aggregate PCE responds asymmetrically to positive and negative oil‐specific demand shocks. Second, we find that aggregate PCE responds negatively to positive oil demand shocks, while adverse oil supply shocks are of limited effect. Third, we find important heterogeneity in the magnitude, sign and timing of the disaggregate PCE responses to structural shocks in the crude oil market. Our results clearly indicate that the response of PCE to an unexpected oil price increase depends on the source of the oil price shock. Our findings are robust to different nonlinear transformations for the real price of oil.     

Fiscal news and macroeconomic volatility

This paper analyzes the contribution of anticipated capital and labor tax shocks to business cycle volatility in an estimated New Keynesian business cycle model. While fiscal policy accounts for about 15% of output variance at business cycle frequencies, this mostly derives from anticipated government spending shocks. Tax shocks, both anticipated and unanticipated, contribute little to the fluctuations of real variables. However, anticipated capital tax shocks do explain a sizable part of inflation fluctuations, accounting for up to 12% of its variance. In line with earlier studies, news shocks in total account for about 50% of output variance. Further decomposing this news effect, we find permanent total factor productivity news shocks to be most important. When looking at the federal level instead of total government, the importance of anticipated tax and spending shocks significantly increases, suggesting that fiscal policy at the subnational level typically counteracts the effects of federal fiscal policy shocks.     

Commodity prices and fiscal policy design: Procyclical despite a rule

Recent studies offer evidence of reduced fiscal procyclicality to commodity price changes in resource‐rich countries—a feature commonly attributed to the adoption of fiscal policy rules. We revisit this issue and find that, by controlling for global activity shocks while allowing for time‐varying changes in both fiscal policy and the volatility of shocks, this finding does not hold. To show this we develop a time‐varying dynamic factor model, allowing for a multiple of shocks, stochastic volatility and time‐varying parameters, and estimate it on data for Norway, whose handling of resource wealth is often cited as exemplary.     

A dual measure of correlation between the Solow residual and output growth

In this paper, we measure U.S. technology shocks by implementing a dual approach, which is based on price data instead of aggregate quantity data. By doing so, we find the relative volatility of technology shocks and the correlation between output fluctuation and technology shocks to be much smaller than those revealed in most real-business-cycle (RBC) studies. Our results support the findings of Burside et al. (Eur Econ Rev 40:861–869, 1996), who showed that the correlation between technology shocks and output is exaggerated in the RBC literature. This suggests that one should examine other sources of fluctuations for a better understanding of the business cycle phenomena.     

The cycle of violence in the Second Intifada: Causality in nonlinear vector autoregressive models

We contest Jaeger and Paserman's claim (Jaeger and Paserman , 2008. The cycle of violence? An empirical analysis of fatalities in the Palestinian–Israeli conflict. American Economic Review 98 (4): 1591–1604) that Palestinians did not react to Israeli aggression during Intifada 2. We address the differences between the two sides in terms of the timing and intensity of violence, estimate nonlinear vector autoregression models that are suitable when the linear vector autoregression innovations are not normally distributed, identify causal effects rather than Granger causality using the principle of weak exogeneity, and introduce the “kill‐ratio” as a concept for testing hypotheses about the cycle of violence. The Israelis killed 1.28 Palestinians for every killed Israeli, whereas the Palestinians killed only 0.09 Israelis for every killed Palestinian.     

Forecasting with approximate dynamic factor models: The role of non-pervasive shocks

This paper studies the role of non-pervasive shocks when forecasting with factor models. To this end, we first introduce a new model that incorporates the effects of non-pervasive shocks, an Approximate Dynamic Factor Model with a sparse model for the idiosyncratic component. Then, we test the forecasting performance of this model both in simulations, and on a large panel of US quarterly data. We find that, when the goal is to forecast a disaggregated variable, which is usually affected by regional or sectorial shocks, it is useful to capture the dynamics generated by non-pervasive shocks; however, when the goal is to forecast an aggregate variable, which responds primarily to macroeconomic, i.e. pervasive, shocks, accounting for non-pervasive shocks is not useful.     

Coordination and non-coordination risks of monetary and macroprudential authorities: A robust welfare analysis

This study compares a central bank’s leaning against the wind approach with a mix of monetary and macroprudential policies under parameter uncertainty in an estimated DSGE model with two financial frictions. We show that uncertainty of the economic environment is an essential constituent in properly designing macroprudential policy. Although coordination between monetary and macroprudential policies minimizes the policymakers’ Bayesian risk, coordination and non-coordination risks threaten the goals of both authorities. The former describes the situation where the authorities partly resign from implementing the monetary policy objectives to stabilize macroprudential risk. The latter is when conducting a non-coordinated macroprudential policy induces higher total Bayesian risk than when only the central bank minimizes the expected total welfare loss. The robust Bayesian macroeconomic rules show that when financial shocks shrink the banks’ or entrepreneurial net worth, a contractionary macroprudential policy should be combined with an expansionary monetary policy. However, if capital adequacy ratio or risk shocks strike the economy, such a conflict in macroeconomics policy instruments disappears, thus synchronizing both policies.     

9. Human Rights: Historical Learning in the Shadow of Violence

This paper emphasizes the historical dimension of human rights understood as a social ethic. Rather than timeless principles, human rights and the universality proper to them emerge in a process of suffering, conflict, political assertion, and institutional change. We can understand them as historical yet also universal by seeing that human rights arise in processes of social learning that take place in an increasingly globalized world. Such learning often has advanced in the face of dramatic violence, for example, the bombing of Hiroshima. But the demands on a global social ethic today are not only a matter of responding to threats and acts of dramatic violence in isolation. Attention to the example of Hiroshima suggests that the problem of violence is bound up with other questions about the regulation of emerging technical powers in a context of inequality and social conflict. To what extent can an ethic centered on human rights provide an ethics that can inform effective responses to these problems? To consider the promise of human rights, we look more closely at the kind of social learning they involve and explore in particular the role of social movements in forging new identities and reciprocities along with normative claims proper to a global public sphere (the anti‐apartheid movement provides an example). We go on to see that these political experiences can inform interpretations of historical experience that can inform a widened sense of historical possibilities, both those missed in the past and those that confront us today. While this argument may thicken our sense of the promise of a human rights ethic, it remains speculative, not least because of the limited effectiveness of these norms in practice today. We close with the suggestion that nonetheless a coherent ethical response is possible, one that in the wealthy parts of the globe might take the form of an ethic of democratic responsibility. This would both represent a distinctive kind of learning and perhaps contribute to a wider advance of human rights.     

Hours per capita and productivity: evidence from correlated unobserved components models

Recent studies debate the effect of a permanent productivity shock on hours per capita within a structural VAR context. This paper examines the issue using a correlated unobserved components (UC) framework. The estimates show that permanent shocks to productivity are negatively correlated with transitory shocks to hours. This result is robust for non‐stationary or levels stationary specifications of hours. Model comparisons indicate that the data do not favor imposing VAR‐type restrictions on the UC models. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Work–family conflict,family satisfaction and employee well‐being: a comparative study of Australian and Indian social workers

Work‐to‐family conflict and family‐to‐work conflict have been widely investigated as antecedents of well‐being in various employee groups. However, these studies have largely been performed in Western countries, and only a few studies have investigated the phenomenon using both Western and non‐Western samples. The present study contributes to the literature by investigating work–family conflict experiences of social workers in Australia and India. More specifically, it explores the impact of work‐to‐family conflict and family‐to‐work conflict on well‐being and the mediating role of family satisfaction in this relationship. Our findings reveal the direct negative effects of work‐to‐family conflict on well‐being and family satisfaction in both groups and of family‐to‐work conflict on well‐being of Indian social workers. There is evidence that family satisfaction mediates work–family conflict and well‐being relationships in both samples. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of the findings for HRM policies in social service agencies of both countries.     

Structural analysis and forecast of gold price returns

Gold has multiple attributes and its price is affected by various factors in the market. This paper studies the dynamic relationship between the gold price returns and its affecting factors. Then we use the STL-ETS, neural network and Bayesian structural time series model to predict the gold price returns, and compare their performance with the benchmark models. The results show that the shocks of crude oil returns and VIX have the positive effect on gold price returns, the shocks of the US dollar index have the negative effect on gold price returns. And the fluctuation of gold price returns mainly depends on crude oil price returns shocks. STL-ETS model can accurately fit the fluctuation trend of the gold price returns and improve prediction accuracy.     

Economic uncertainty and national bitcoin trading activity

This study analyzes the dynamics between bitcoin trading, price activities, and economic surprise shocks from a broad and novel perspective on a national level. We start by estimating the response of bitcoin trading in terms of volume and volatility to economic surprises. Following this, we extend our framework by applying a Generalized AutoRegressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity model to get an indication of the volatility reaction of national bitcoin activities to economic surprise shocks. Our results show that local and global shocks affect local bitcoin activities and trading volatilities, confirming that economic events affect bitcoin markets. We argue that increased trading activity, coupled with a price reaction, indicates that bitcoin might be considered a hedge or safe haven asset against economic uncertainty. We find evidence that bitcoin is treated as a speculative asset against negative economic policy uncertainty shocks in Canada pre-Covid-19. These results change during the Covid-19 pandemic, leading to a significant structural break. Here, we find indications that bitcoin might be treated as a safe-haven asset in New Zealand and Australia. This shows that bitcoin behaves differently depending on the studied country, underlining the importance of country-level studies. It also shows that bitcoin is a new asset that is evolving rapidly and that the period in which it is studied is important.