Vally Koubi

Climate Variability, Economic Growth, and Civil Conflict

Despite many claims by high-ranking policymakers and some scientists that climate change breeds violent conflict, the existing empirical literature has so far not been able to identify a systematic, causal relationship of this kind. This may either reflect de facto absence of such a relationship, or it may be the consequence of theoretical and methodological limitations of existing work. In this article we revisit the climate–conflict hypothesis along two lines. First, we concentrate on indirect effects of climatic conditions on conflict, whereas most of the existing literature focuses on direct effects. Specifically, we examine the causal pathway linking climatic conditions to economic growth and to armed conflict, and argue that the growth–conflict part of this pathway is contingent on the political system. Second, we employ a measure of climatic variability that has advantages over those used in the existing literature because it can presumably take into account the adaptation of production to persistent climatic changes. For the empirical analysis we use a global dataset for 1980–2004 and design the testing strategy tightly in line with our theory. Our empirical analysis does not produce evidence for the claim that climate variability affects economic growth. However, we find some, albeit weak, support for the hypothesis that non-democratic countries are more likely to experience civil conflict when economic conditions deteriorate.

War and Economic Performance

This article studies the consequences of inter-and intrastate wars for economic growth in a large cross-section of countries during the period 1960–89. It establishes that cross-country differences in economic growth are systematically related to the severity and duration of war. The combined prewar, contemporaneous, and postwar association between growth and war is negative; that is, economic performance has been lower in countries that fought a severe and/or prolonged war. However, the causal effect of war on postwar economic performance is positive. In particular, the longer or more severe the war, the higher the subsequent long-term rate of economic growth. A possible interpretation of these findings is that war is more likely to occur in poorly performing countries and/or to have a negative direct – contemporaneous – effect on growth. But in the longer term, war creates growth-enhancing possibilities. Interestingly, these effects arise mostly from civil wars and are quantitatively quite substantial. For instance, an increase in war duration by 10% leads to an increase of 2.1% in the average growth rate. The findings of this article are thus consistent with the predictions of the theories of both Organski & Kugler and Olson.

Environmental changes and violent conflict

This letter reviews the scientific literature on whether and how environmental changes affect the risk of violent conflict. The available evidence from qualitative case studies indicates that environmental stress can contribute to violent conflict in some specific cases. Results from quantitative large-N studies, however, strongly suggest that we should be careful in drawing general conclusions. Those large-N studies that we regard as the most sophisticated ones obtain results that are not robust to alternative model specifications and, thus, have been debated. This suggests that environmental changes may, under specific circumstances, increase the risk of violent conflict, but not necessarily in a systematic way and unconditionally. Hence there is, to date, no scientific consensus on the impact of environmental changes on violent conflict. This letter also highlights the most important challenges for further research on the subject. One of the key issues is that the effects of environmental changes on violent conflict are likely to be contingent on a set of economic and political conditions that determine adaptation capacity. In the authors’ view, the most important indirect effects are likely to lead from environmental changes via economic performance and migration to violent conflict.

A Comparison of International and Domestic Sources of Global Governance Dynamics

Existing empirical models of international co-operation emphasize domestic determinants, although virtually all theories of international relations focus on interdependencies between countries. This article examines how much states’ linkages with the international system, relative to domestic factors, such as income and democracy, influence the dynamics of global governance efforts. To this end, we study the ratification behaviour of 180 countries vis-a-vis 255 global environmental treaties. Except for integration into the world economy, which affects co-operative behaviour negatively, our results show that international factors have a stronger and more positive impact on cooperative behaviour than domestic factors. This implies that Galton’s advice not to examine the effects of internal and external variables in isolation is also useful in the study of international politics.

One effect to rule them all? A comment on climate and conflict

A recent Climatic Change review article reports a remarkable convergence of scientific evidence for a link between climatic events and violent intergroup conflict, thus departing markedly from other contemporary assessments of the empirical literature. This commentary revisits the review in order to understand the discrepancy. We believe the origins of the disagreement can be traced back to the review article’s underlying quantitative meta-analysis, which suffers from shortcomings with respect to sample selection and analytical coherence. A modified assessment that addresses some of these problems suggests that scientific research on climate and conflict to date has produced mixed and inconclusive results.

Do natural resources matter for interstate and intrastate armed conflict

This article reviews the existing theoretical arguments and empirical findings linking renewable and non-renewable natural resources to the onset, intensity, and duration of intrastate as well as interstate armed conflict. Renewable resources are supposedly connected to conflict via scarcity, while non-renewable resources are hypothesized to lead to conflict via resource abundance. Based upon our analysis of these two streams in the literature, it turns out that the empirical support for the resource scarcity argument is rather weak. However, the authors obtain some evidence that resource abundance is likely to be associated with conflict. The article concludes that further research should generate improved data on low-intensity forms of conflict as well as resource scarcity and abundance at subnational and international levels, and use more homogenous empirical designs to analyze these data. Such analyses should pay particular attention to interactive effects and endogeneity issues in the resource–conflict relationship.

Business cycles and schooling

Abstract It has been suggested that recessions are the appropriate time for undertaking activities that promote long-term performance (such as re-organization, human capital investments, R&D). In this paper, we study the cyclical patterns of one such activity, namely schooling. In particular, we examine the cyclicality in the school enrollment rates of various age groups in the US. The overall pattern is countercyclical. In addition, schooling seems to respond negatively to the expected real interest rate. Overall, the results seem to support the view that variation in opportunity costs associated with business cycles plays a major role in schooling decisions.

States as Providers of Public Goods: How Does Government Size Affect Environmental Quality?

Theories explaining government size and its consequences are of two varieties. The first portrays government as a provider of public goods and a corrector of externalities. The second includes theories on bureaucracy and interest groups. One key difference is that an expansion in government size is unambiguously associated with an increase in social welfare only in theories of the former variety. As to the latter variety, the association between government size and public goods provision (or social welfare) is either negative or ambiguous. We study the empirical significance of these competing claims by examining the relationship between government size and environmental quality (notably, air quality measured by SO2 concentrations) for 42 countries over the period 1971-96. We find that the relationship is negative. This result does not prove conclusively that government size expansion has been driven by factors other than concern for the public good. But it supports a presumption against the theory of government size that emphasizes public good provision.

National and Regional Economic Consequences of Swiss Defense Spending

The effects of defense spending on economic performance and, in particular, on economic growth have been studied extensively in the literature. The empirical findings have been ambiguous so far, partly reflecting the econometric difficulties involved in the estimation of this relationship. The authors study the implications of Swiss defense spending for economic growth and unemployment in Switzerland, using both national aggregate and cross-sectional (cantonal) data. Such analysis may be more informative than similar analyses that rely on time series for individual countries (due to spurious time effects) or averages for different countries (due to strong cross country variation in country characteristics). The findings indicate that although defense spending has had a positive effect on the rate of economic growth of Switzerland in the presence of an external threat (Cold War), the distribution of defense spending across cantons has not contributed to the dispersion of cantonal growth rates. Nonetheless, cantons in which military employment is a large share of total employment have enjoyed lower and more stable unemployment rates. These findings suggest that in order to uncover the full implications of defense spending, it is necessary to go beyond the defense spending—growth nexus. The findings seem relevant for many other countries because the allocation of national defense employment and spending is rarely uniform across the regions of any country.

The effects of treaty legality and domestic institutional hurdles on environmental treaty ratification

We study the effects of treaty design and domestic institutional hurdles on the ratification behavior of states with respect to multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs). Specifically, we examine whether (1) strong legality mandated by a treaty such as precisely stated obligations, strong monitoring/enforcement mechanisms, and dispute resolution procedures, and (2) high domestic constitutional hurdles such as requirements for explicit legislative approval deter countries from ratifying a treaty. To test our theoretical claim, we use a new time-series-cross-sectional dataset that includes information on the ratification behavior of 162 countries with respect to 220 MEAs in 1950–2000. We find that treaties that are characterized as ‘hard’ indeed deter ratification. Furthermore, explicit legislative approval requiring supermajority also makes treaty ratification less likely.