Mare Sarr

Dictators Walking the Mogadishu Line: How Men Become Monsters and Monsters Become Men

History offers many examples of dictators who worsened their behavior significantly over time (like Zimbabwes Mugabe) as well as dictators who displayed remarkable improvements (like Rawlings of Ghana). The authors show that such mutations can result from rational behavior when the dictators flow use of repression is complementary to his stock of wrongdoings: past wrongdoings then perpetuate further wrongdoings and the dictator can unintentionally get trapped in a repressive steady state where he himself suffers from ex-post regret. This then begs the question why such a dictator would ever choose to do wrong in the first place. The authors show that this can be explained from the dictators uncertainty over his degree of impunity in relation to wrongdoing, which induces him to experiment along this dimension. This produces a setting where any individual rising to power can end up as either a moderate leader, or as a dreaded tyrant. Since derailment is accidental and accompanied by ex-post regret, increasing accountability can be in the interest of both the public and the dictator.

Intellectual Property and Biodiversity: When and Where are Property Rights Important?

An important issue in the life sciences industries concerns the nature of the incentive mechanism that should govern the production of innovation within this RD property rights in genetic information alone; or in both? We demonstrate that in a world in which traditional knowledge and genetic information are complements in the production of R&D, a resolution of the property rights failure in genetic information also may resolve the allocation failure in traditional knowledge even in the absence of a distinct property right. The reason is that traditional knowledge of the nature of private information is comparable to a trade secret. Traditional knowledge holders may use this informational advantage to improve their benefit by capturing some informational rent. A new property right is important to enable bargaining and coordination to occur across the industry, but a single property right is probably sufficient to enable coordination between the two agents.

Time-consistency and Dictator Punishment: Discretion Rather than Rules?

Following Kydland and Prescott’s (1977) seminal work exhorting the use of rules over discretion, many governments responded by attempting to bind policy makers who are susceptible to time-inconsistency. In subsequent decades, much of the policy discussion and analysis has been concentrated on monetary policy (cf. the extensive literature following Barro and Gordon (1983)). However, there have been other fields where governments have increased their commitment to remain time-consistent. One such area is international justice and the treatment of dictators and warlords who have committed crimes under international law. There, commitment has been increased through the establishment of a permanent International Criminal Court (ICC) in 2002. The purpose of the ICC is to hold high ranking officials (including heads of state) accountable for acts of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. Indeed, an explicit aim of the Rome Statute (the treaty that established the ICC) is to “to put an end to impunity for the perpetrators of these crimes and thus to contribute to the prevention of such crimes”.

Resistance to the Regulation of Common Water Resources in Rural Tunisia

We examine the effect of the introduction of uniform water charging for aquifer management and provide evidence using a survey-based choice experiment of agricultural water users in rural Tunisia. Theoretically, we show that the implementation of the proposed second-best regulation would result both in efficiency gains and in distributional effects in favor of small landholders. Empirically, we find that resistance to the introduction of an effective water-charging regime is greatest among the largest landholders. Resistance to the regulation of common resources may be rooted in the manner in which heterogeneity might determine the distributional impact of different management regimes. (JEL Q25, Q28)

The Political Economy of Fisheries Reforms in Sénégal

Fisheries in Senegal are comprised of two sub-sectors: the artisanal sub-sector and the industrial sub-sector. While access to the Senegalese industrial sub-sector is controlled through licensing, making it a regulated form of limited access, the artisanal sub-sector essentially operates in a “quasi” unregulated open access environment. A major challenge presented by the current regulatory system is the need to regulate access to the artisanal sub-sector which represents 90 percent of all catches. In the late 1990s and early 2000s the realization of the shift from fish abundance to systematic depletion of the stock created a sense of urgency and a willingness to reform the way fisheries are managed to prevent an irreversible damage. This paper provides a political economy and historical perspective to analyse the fisheries reforms undertaken in Senegal in the 2000s. We show that while the design of the reform of industrial fisheries has been fairly successful, the reform of artisanal fisheries has been fairly contentious and problematic due to its complexity as well as the diversity of the actors involved. Possible avenues to improve the process of reform are also proposed.

Corruption and the Curse: The Dictator’s Choice

We develop a dynamic discrete choice model of a self-interested and unchecked ruler making decisions regarding the exploitation of a resource-rich country. This dictator makes the recursive choice between either investing domestically to live off the productivity of the country while facing the risk of being ousted, or looting the country’s riches by liquefying the resources and departing. We demonstrate that important parameters determining this choice include the level of resources, liquidity and indebtedness. We find that the dictator’s choice regarding the timing of departure is significantly related to external lending, investment and debt. We then argue that this looting phenomenon provides an explanation for the generation of corrupt economies in resource-rich countries. An empirical analysis of available corruption indices suggests that instability-led looting provides a more fundamental explanation of perceived corruption than do various social and cultural indicators or the economic theory of internal political competition.