Maarten Voors

Social Pathways for Ebola Virus Disease in Rural Sierra Leone, and Some Implications for Containment

The current outbreak of Ebola Virus Disease in Upper West Africa is the largest ever recorded. Molecular evidence suggests spread has been almost exclusively through human-to-human contact. Social factors are thus clearly important to understand the epidemic and ways in which it might be stopped, but these factors have so far been little analyzed. The present paper focuses on Sierra Leone, and provides cross sectional data on the least understood part of the epidemic—the largely undocumented spread of Ebola in rural areas. Various forms of social networking in rural communities and their relevance for understanding pathways of transmission are described. Particular attention is paid to the relationship between marriage, funerals and land tenure. Funerals are known to be a high-risk factor for infection. It is suggested that more than a shift in awareness of risks will be needed to change local patterns of behavior, especially in regard to funerals, since these are central to the consolidation of community ties. A concluding discussion relates the information presented to plans for halting the disease. Local consultation and access are seen as major challenges to be addressed.

Conflict and the Evolution of Institutions: Unbundling Institutions at the Local Level in Burundi

The impact of armed conflict may persist long after the end of war, and may include a lasting institutional legacy. We use a novel dataset from rural Burundi to examine the impact of local exposure to conflict on institutional quality, and try to ‘unbundle’ institutions by distinguishing between three dimensions of the institutional framework: property rights security, local political institutions, and social capital. We find that conflict exposure affects institutional quality, and document that the impact of conflict on institutional quality may be positive or negative, depending on the institutional measure. Specifically, exposure to violence strengthens in-group social capital and promotes tenure security. However, the appreciation for state institutions is negatively affected by exposure to violence. We find no evidence consistent with design-based theories of institutional quality, or the idea that institutional quality is enhanced by interventions of (non)state external actors. Instead our findings provide some support for the theory of parochial altruism. Our results emphasize the importance for policymakers to consider autonomous responses to conflict when designing development programs. They further imply some caution for actors seeking to reform local institutions through top-down interventions.

Resources and Governance in Sierra Leone’s Civil War

Abstract We empirically investigate the role of natural resources, and governance in explaining variation in the intensity of conflict during the 1991–2002 civil war in Sierra Leone. As a proxy for governance quality we exploit exogenous variation in political competition at the level of the chieftaincy. As a proxy for resources we use data on the location of pre-war mining sites. Our main result is that neither governance nor resources robustly explains the onset or duration of violence during the civil war in Sierra Leone.

Smallholder dairy sheep production and market channel development: an institutional perspective of rural Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.

The rural economy of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia has been adapting to new economic and political realities. Especially important for rural areas has been the breakdown of the socialist market structure in agriculture, which meant the demise of cooperative structures and farmers gaining access to new market outlets. The aim of this paper is to investigate the potential of dairy sheep farmers to enter into new contracts with buyers and to analyze why some farmers continue selling to traditional market outlets. Using survey data of dairy sheep farmers we studied the choice they make between 3 market outlets: (1) selling milk to a recently established large dairy processor, (2) selling milk to traditional small local processors, or (3) transforming milk on-farm into cheese and selling it at the farm gate or at local markets. The significance of determinants of choice for these markets were tested in a multinomial logit model, which showed that distance to the collection point of the large dairy processor was the most important determinant of whether farmers sold milk or made cheese, with those at a greater distance selling cheese. Furthermore, we analyzed the main sources of transaction costs in developing new market channels. Overcoming transport and transaction costs may contribute to higher income for the farmers and hence to improving their livelihoods.

Social network analysis predicts health behaviours and self-reported health in African villages.

The provision of healthcare in rural African communities is a highly complex and largely unsolved problem. Two main difficulties are the identification of individuals that are most likely affected by disease and the prediction of responses to health interventions. Social networks have been shown to capture health outcomes in a variety of contexts. Yet, it is an open question as to what extent social network analysis can identify and distinguish among households that are most likely to report poor health and those most likely to respond to positive behavioural influences. We use data from seven highly remote, post-conflict villages in Liberia and compare two prominent network measures: in-degree and betweenness. We define in-degree as the frequency in which members from one household are named by another household as a friends. Betweenness is defined as the proportion of shortest friendship paths between any two households in a network that traverses a particular household. We find that in-degree explains the number of ill family members, whereas betweenness explains engagement in preventative health. In-degree and betweenness independently explained self-reported health and behaviour, respectively. Further, we find that betweenness predicts susceptibility to, instead of influence over, good health behaviours. The results suggest that targeting households based on network measures rather than health status may be effective for promoting the uptake of health interventions in rural poor villages.

Cómo mejorar su relación con su futuro yo

This essay provides practical advice about how to do transparent and reproducible data analysis and writing. We note that doing research in this way today will not only improve the cumulation of knowledge within a discipline, but it will also improve the life of the researcher tomorrow. We organize the argument around a series of homilies that lead to concrete actions. (1) Data analysis is computer programming. (2) No data analyst is an island for long. (3) The territory of data analysis requires maps. (4) Version control prevents clobbering, reconciles history, and helps organize work. (5) Testing minimizes error. (6) Work *can* be reproducible. (7) Research ought to be credible communication.

Conflict Exposure and Competitiveness: Experimental Evidence from the Football Field in Sierra Leone

We use data from a street football tournament and a series of lab-in-field experiments in postconflict Sierra Leone to examine the impact of exposure to conflict violence on competitive behavior. We find that football players who experienced more intense exposure to violence are more likely to get a foul card during a game. In the lab we find that these individuals are significantly less risk averse and more altruistic toward their in-group (teammates). We then isolate competitiveness from aggressiveness and find that conflict exposure increases the willingness to compete toward the out-group. These results are in line with theory highlighting the role of intergroup conflict in increasing in-group cooperation while exacerbating out-group antagonism. Next to other-regarding preferences and risk propensity, changes in individual preferences for competition may affect long-run development trajectories and postconflict recovery.

Know your neighbor : The impact of social context on fairness behavior

Laboratory experiments offer an opportunity to isolate human behaviors with a level of precision that is often difficult to obtain using other (survey-based) methods. Yet, experimental tasks are often stripped of any social context, implying that inferences may not directly map to real world contexts. We randomly allocate 632 individuals (grouped randomly into 316 dyads) from small villages in Sierra Leone to four versions of the ultimatum game. In addition to the classic ultimatum game, where both the sender and receiver are anonymous, we reveal the identity of the sender, the receiver or both. This design allows us to explore how fairness behavior is affected by social context in a natural setting where players are drawn from populations that are well-acquainted. We find that average offers increase when the receiver’s identity is revealed, suggesting that anonymous ultimatum games underestimate expected fair offers. This study suggest that researchers wishing to relate laboratory behavior to contexts in which the participants are well-acquainted should consider revealing the identities of the players during game play.

Customary West African Rural Factor Markets

We discuss customary institutional arrangements governing the mobilization and allocation of production factors. This includes a description of agricultural production in West Africa, followed by an in-depth discussion of how institutions interlink with the allocation and accumulation of land, labour, and capital. Social bonds play an important role in mobilizing capital, where access to markets and formal financial systems are low. The key resources for agricultural productivity are land and labour. We look at the role of chiefs and family descent groups (or clans) in regulating user rights to land. We show both how, historically, agrarian servitude helped overcome labour bottlenecks, and how today, labour mobilization sometimes takes place via the judicial system.

Not All Is Markets

This chapter provides a short review of current debates about institutions, focusing on the economist’s and the anthropologist’s perspective. We start with narratives by economists on the origins and evolution of institutions (e.g. transaction costs and efficiency, the struggle between different social groups). We then augment the conventional focus on markets and hierarchy (Oliver Williamson) by introducing a four-field framework for analysing institutions, which is developed along two axes: the group—and the grid dimension. This framework, proposed by Douglas, has gained little traction in economics until now, but we show how it can be useful to understand institutional dynamics in rural development in West Africa.