How can an escalation of tensions between the major ethno-religious groups be avoided in a democratizing Iraq? The first section explains why and under which conditions democratization may stir up, rather than palliate ethnic conflicts: when networks of civil society organizations have not yet...

The Petersberg conference held near Bonn at the beginning of December 2001 and the donor conference held in Tokyo in mid-January 2002 defined the broad outlines for peace-making and reconstruction in Afghanistan. Under the Bonn agreement, a loya jirga consisting of representatives from all the...

In this paper, we assess the effect of globalization on the distribution of income within countries, focussing on the influence of foreign direct investment. We analyze data for 72 countries, 1970-90. We incorporate in our tests the Kuznets (1955) curve, measures of the character of political...

Pessimists on globalization claim that liberalization of markets allows multinational corporations free reign, constraining local autonomy and precipitating a "race to the bottom" that will endanger recent democratic gains. The optimists see the end of dirigiste economic models as favorable for...

This paper calls attention to the instrumental role of democracy and press freedom in combating corruption. As opposed to an autocracy with no or limited press freedom, a free press in a democracy can inform voters about the corruption of political representatives, and voters in turn can punish...

The present paper investigates how ethnic violence and civil war in Sri Lanka have affected local property rights institutions . I use local case studies to analyze the institutional relations and alliances between civilians and combatants in the emergent society of violence that shapes local...

The purpose of this paper is to empirically analyze economic and policy factors affecting pollution by Township and Village Industrial Enterprises (TVIEs) in China and to discuss problems and directions in environmental policies for them. With the rapid growth of TVIEs since the early 1980s,...

Golden Rice has been genetically engineered to produce beta-carotene in the endosperm of the grain. It could improve the vitamin A status of deficient food consumers, especially women and children in the developing world. This paper analyses the potential impacts in a Philippine context. Since...

This paper analyses the reform progress made in the energy-rich states of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan (AKTU for short) and contrasts their development to that in the resource-poor countries at the CIS periphery. The main...

Ethiopian montane rainforests are economically valuable repositories of biodiversity, especially of wild Coffea arabica populations, and they are vanishing at accelerating rates. Our research results confirm theory which explains biodiversity loss by diverging private and social net benefits...