5 results
4.1 - alternative perspective
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- By S. Brock Blomberg, Professor of Economics, Claremont McKenna College, California, USA
- Edited by Bjorn Lomborg, Copenhagen Business School
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- Book:
- Prioritizing Development
- Published online:
- 30 May 2018
- Print publication:
- 07 June 2018, pp 89-89
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Summary
My purpose in this perspective is to estimate benefit-cost ratios for the various targets proposed by Fearon and Hoeffler. I estimate most of the targets to be in the Fair to Good range. The authors have done a remarkable job in cataloging various forms of violence, their costs, and the benefits of existing programs. However, one notable weakness is the inability to provide systematic BCRs.
If I could obtain estimates of the benefits of reduced violence, the cost of aid, and the elasticity of aid effectiveness on violence, I could estimate the various BCRs, but this is not a simple task. The authors’ reluctance to follow this route is understandable because such an exercise may be highly speculative.
Fearon and Hoeffler's estimates of the benefits of a world without violence – 11.9 percent of GDP for low- and middle-income countries – are consistent with what one might expect. I assume that the elasticity of aid effectiveness is similar to that for other areas, reducing poverty and encouraging growth and development, for example. The typical estimate of elasticity is 0.01, but I use both this and a more recent, but still small, estimate of 0.03.
The costs of violence differ dramatically with its type and the region. The welfare costs are largest for child abuse and female violence by intimate partners. Latin America and the Caribbean, the Middle East and North Africa, and sub-Saharan Africa are the areas with the greatest potential for benefits.
The ratio of the cost of aid to the potential benefits is significantly large. Using the authors’ measures, the ratio is greater than 30 on average and is as large as 110 in Europe and Central Asia. It is smaller in sub-Saharan Africa and other regions because there is such a significant commitment to aid in these regions. Using the elasticities from the literature, the BCRs fall below 1 for measures to curb violence on a global basis. However, individual regions fare better, particularly Europe and Central Asia and the Middle East and North Africa, where the estimates are between 1 and 3 (Fair).
Chapter 2 - Armed Conflicts: The Economic Welfare Costs of Conflict
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- By S. Brock Blomberg, Claremont McKenna College, Gregory D. Hess, Claremont McKenna College
- Edited by Bjørn Lomborg, Copenhagen Business School
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- Book:
- How Much Have Global Problems Cost the World?
- Published online:
- 05 June 2014
- Print publication:
- 10 October 2013, pp 99-116
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Summary
Introduction
Conflicts, of various sizes and purported purposes, cast a long and dark shadow on the lives of many and on the histories of nations and peoples. Theories of conflict abound – for wars between nations, internal civil conflicts, and terrorist operations – primarily based on national or group leaders convincing followers to take up a fight for some purpose, noble (to advance an idea, a religion, a culture, a form of government) or otherwise (to appropriate). While leaders, on occasion, do profit from conflict, they do so less often than they might ever imagine. Indeed, leaders, depending on institutional constraints, can separate the spoils of war (land, resources) from the dim costs of war.
The men and women who conduct the battles, however, can seldom avoid the costs of war, and so are fully saddled with the loss of life, limb, loved ones, livelihood, and way of life. Nor are the soldiers’ interests fully reflected in the interests of those who make the decision to initiate, continue or to change the course of battle. In his famous letter to his World War I commanding officer, Lt. Siegfried Sassoon of the Royal Welch Fusiliers, wrote:
I believe that the war upon which I entered as a war of defence and liberation has now become a war of agression [sic] and conquest. . . . I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops and I can no longer be a party to prolonging these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust. I am not protesting against the conduct of the war, but against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed. On behalf of those who are suffering now, I make this protest against the deception which is being practised upon them; also I believe it may help to destroy the callous complacency with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share and which they have not enough imagination to realise. July, 1917
9 - Transnational terrorism
- Edited by Bjørn Lomborg, Copenhagen Business School
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- Book:
- Global Crises, Global Solutions
- Published online:
- 05 June 2012
- Print publication:
- 09 July 2009, pp 516-584
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Summary
Introduction
Major terrorist campaigns date back to the Jewish Zealots' struggle against the Roman Empire from 48 AD to 70 AD, the Hindu Thugs' brutal attacks against innocent travelers in India from 600 AD to 1836 AD, and the Assassins' actions against the Christian crusaders in the Middle East from 1090 AD to 1956 AD (Bloom, 2005; Rapoport, 1984). In fact, the Thugs may have murdered more than 800 people a year during their twelve-century existence (Hoffman, 2006, 82–83), making them twice as deadly on an annual basis as the modern era of terrorism (1968–2006). Some form of terrorism has characterized civilization for the last 2,000 years. Each of the two recent globalization periods has been associated with transnational terrorism that has international implications. In the earlier era of globalization starting in 1878 and ending in 1914, the anarchists waged a terrorist campaign that culminated in World War I. More recently, leftists and fundamentalists utilized transnational trrorism to capture headlines during the current era of globalization from the last third of the twentieth century to the present day.
During the modern era of transnational terrorism, terrorists crossed borders and, in some instances, staged incidents in foreign capitals to focus world attention on their cause or grievance.
3 - From (No) Butter to Guns? Understanding the Economic Role in Transnational Terrorism
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- By S. Brock Blomberg, Professor, Claremont McKenna College, Gregory D. Hess, Dean of faculty and vice president for academic affairs, Claremont McKenna College
- Edited by Philip Keefer, The World Bank, Norman Loayza, The World Bank
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- Book:
- Terrorism, Economic Development, and Political Openness
- Published online:
- 06 July 2010
- Print publication:
- 11 February 2008, pp 83-115
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Summary
This chapter provides a comprehensive study of the economic determinants of transnational terrorism and the role that development plays in fostering a more peaceful world. We analyze models of conflict resolution to investigate the relative importance of economic development on domestic and transnational terrorism. We construct an original database from 1968 to 2003 for 179 countries in order to examine which economic factors influence the propensity to be affected by transnational terrorist activities. We also compare these results to a subsample from 1998 to 2003 on domestic terrorism. We find that economic development is associated with higher incidents of transnational terrorism, especially in higher income countries. However, when considering lower income countries, economic progress is actually negatively related to transnational terrorism.
Introduction
We live in the Age of Terrorism. Since the prominent incidents in high-income cities such as New York, Madrid, and London, and persistent terrorism in Middle Eastern countries such as Israel and Iraq, both academia and the media have become involved in a careful examination of the causes of terrorism. Terrorism is, however, neither new nor novel – indeed the very origin of the term dating back to the late 1700s points to a long history. Given its long history, we know surprisingly little about it. The purpose of this chapter is to begin to unravel the important linkages between economic development and the incidence of terrorism.
4 - The Lexus and the Olive Branch: Globalization, Democratization, and Terrorism
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- By S. Brock Blomberg, Professor, Claremont McKenna College, Gregory D. Hess, Dean of faculty and Vice President for academic affairs, Claremont McKenna College
- Edited by Philip Keefer, The World Bank, Norman Loayza, The World Bank
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- Book:
- Terrorism, Economic Development, and Political Openness
- Published online:
- 06 July 2010
- Print publication:
- 11 February 2008, pp 116-147
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Summary
This chapter provides an original study into how democratization and globalization influence terrorism, examining the motives of terrorists and how democratic institutions and international integration influence nonstate economic actors. We employ a gravity model to investigate the relative importance of globalization and democratization on transnational terrorism. We construct an original database of more than 200,000 observations from 1968 to 2003 for 179 countries to examine the extent to which economic, political, and historical factors influence the likelihood of citizens from one country to engage in terrorist activities against another. We find that the advent of democratic institutions, high income, and more openness in a source country significantly reduce terrorism. However, the advent of these same positive developments in targeted countries actually increases terrorism. Ceteris paribus, the effect of being a democracy or participating in the WTO for a source country decreases the number of transnational terrorist strikes by about two to three per year, which is more than two standard deviations greater than the average number of strikes between any two countries in a given year.
Introduction
World foreign direct investment flows (FDI), which amounted to less than $13 billion in 1970, quadrupled every ten years, reaching $54 billion in 1980 and $209 billion in 1990. During the last half of the 1990s, however, FDI practically exploded, reaching a peak of $1.4 trillion in 2000. Worldwide trade also increased dramatically over the same time period.