Post-conflict situations face a high risk of reversion to conflict. We investigate the effect of military expenditure by the government during the first decade post-conflict on the risk of reversion. We contrast two theories as to the likely effects. In one, military spending deters conflict by...

In the 1980s conditional lending for structural adjustment in developing countries moved the IMF beyond its role of macroeconomic crisis management. Fund-supported adjustment programmes have often been flawed by a lack of distributional analysis and by poor sequencing of reforms, notably...

We suggest that the 'poverty-efficiency' aid allocation is merely a benchmark guide if a donor lacks other information about the country and also the power to change or prevail over government preferences. We argue that in most circumstances donors have only limited scope for the latter and...

We investigate the causes of civil war, using a new data set of wars during 1960-99. We test a `greed’ theory focusing on the ability to finance rebellion, against a`grievance’ theory focusing on ethnic and religious divisions, political repression and inequality. We find that greed...

In this paper, we use firm-level panel data for the manufacturing sector in four African countries to estimate the effect of exporting on efficiency. Estimating simultaneously a production function and an export regression that control for unobserved firm effects, we find both significant...

Civil wars are intricate social, political and psychological phenomena. However, economics can offer analytical insights which are useful alongside the more conventional approach of case-studies. Indeed, the policy conclusions drawn from economic analysis sometimes cast doubt on conventional...

Deliberate killing is a common part of the defining features of both homicide and civil war. Often, the scale of killing is also similar: most countries have homicide rates that exceed the threshold of one thousand combat-related deaths during a year that is the standard criterion for civil war....