Suchergebnisse

There is clear evidence embedded in the geological record of natural disasters such as volcanic activity, earthquakes, floods, hurricanes and the like striking earth for many millennia. Interestingly and for as yet unknown reasons, there has been a fourfold increase in such disasters over the last four decades. While the reason or reasons for this spike is yet to be understand (randomness, long-term trends or perhaps global warming), it has led to a great deal of research into the relationships between natural disasters and socio-economic factors. While many could be listed, research into whether disasters spawn public sector corruption, how effective mitigation actions such as tidal buoys and seismographs can prove to be, whether institutions such as property rights play a role in determining a disaster's devastation and the impact of disasters on differing country's economic growth serve as good examples. We add to this literature by considering the seemingly obvious relationship between the quality of a country's infrastructure and deaths due to disasters which to date has not been tested as there has been no consistent, cross-country measure of infrastructure quality. To be sure, our expectation is that quality infrastructure mitigates disasters but it is this missing link in the research that we seek to fill. To provide a direct test of the importance of infrastructure, we consider 126 countries that experienced at least one natural disaster during the period 2005-2012. The data on disasters is taken from the EM-DAT archive, collected and maintained by the non-profit institution Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED). The uniqueness of the analysis is made possible by the use of the only consistent, cross-country measure of infrastructure quality recently made available by the World Economic Forum's annual Global Competitiveness Report . Given that the key dependent variable throughout is a count of deaths, the empirical analyses are based on a series of Negative Binomial panel models. As expected, we find consistent, negative and strong statistically significant relationships between a country's infrastructure quality and deaths due to disasters. Thus, the results suggest that when decision-making takes place within a country with respect to how its resources will be spent, investments in high-quality infrastructure will certainly yield positive returns when disasters strike. Similarly, governmental and non-governmental agencies that provide development assistance would well serve developing countries through loans and grants designed to provide funding for the development of high-quality infrastructure.

Most studies on private investment focus either on macroeconomic conditions or sociopolitical climate to explain private investment patterns. We go a step further and examine empirically the joint effect of macroeconomic uncertainty, sociopolitical instability and public provision on private investment using data from 37 developing countries between 1970 and 2000. Our results show that macroeconomic instability, macroeconomic uncertainty and socio-political instability jointly have a negative impact on private investment. Our empirical findings enable identification of particular social and political imbalance attributes that deter private investment. Furthermore we establish a detrimental effect of public provision, when measured by public investment, on private investment and a beneficial effect when measured by infrastructure availability. Influential policy implications are then developed, especially in the face of the unprecedented Eurozone crisis in the post war period.

At least to some extent due to pressure from international donors, many countries have become more fiscally decentralized the underlying premise being that greater decentralization might improve the provision of local public goods and services. We test this proposition by determining whether relatively more decentralized countries fare better when natural disasters strike in terms of its effects on the population. Overall, we find evidence supporting our maintained hypothesis, though the effect appears much more robust in developing countries. Adapted from the source document.

A transportation network is vital to an economy. However, the U.S. highway infrastructure suffers from insufficient maintenance creating inefficiencies such as increased travel times and increase in accidents. The means to fund the infrastructure and their maintenance is a point of debate. In this paper, we examine the role of political institutions and decision‐making on the quality of highway infrastructure by focusing on the role of fiscal decentralization. Using generalized linear model estimation on state data from 1992 to 2012, we find evidence that fiscal decentralization improves infrastructure quality. These results are robust to the choice of control variables and method of estimation. (JEL D73, H42, H72)

One of the most heated sports debates in recent history has been the politically tangled NFL Kneeling protest. Since the 2016 NFL preseason, many football players took up kneeling during the national anthem as a form of silent protest to voice their opinions on systemic inequality that individuals faced in the United States. We are interested to see if our survey respondents' support of the actions of the players and whether or not they would like the NFL commissioner to take action against the players that participated in the protest. Furthermore, we want to see if respondents' answers vary depending on their party affiliation. Our study's results indicate that there is a statistically significant difference between party affiliation and support of the players' actions. In addition, we also found a statistically significant difference between party affiliation and the commissioner taking action.

Cholera and other diarrheal diseases are the second leading cause of death among the poor globally. The tragedy of this statistic is that it need not be the case. Unlike many afflictions, the impact of cholera can be greatly reduced, if not eliminated, through the provision of clean water services. This begs the question of why such provision is absent in much of the world. It is our contention that the provision of clean water services is an increasing function of both a country's level of income and income equality. We test these hypotheses by analyzing 1,032 annual observations arising from 55 relatively poor countries between the years 1980 and 2002. In the primary part of the analysis, we find that providing clean water is, as predicted, an increasing function of income and equality. Following this, and consistent with the existing epidemiological research on cholera, we find that both the numbers of cases and deaths resulting from a given cholera outbreak are strongly and negatively related to the provision of clean water.

Various countries have recently implemented Freedom of Information acts believing that greater transparency can reduce public sector corruption. To test this, we analyze annual data on 128 countries between 1984 and 2003 using a variety of propensity score matching techniques and overall find no significant relationship with one exception: In the developing world, FOI acts are significantly associated with rising levels of corruption. Further investigation suggests this may be due to the fact that the effectiveness of FOI acts appears to be conditioned by a country's institutional arrangements. Adapted from the source document.

Abstract Responsible for 20 million severe injuries and/or deaths annually, few epidemics receive less attention than traffic accidents. Going beyond confirming an inverted U‐shaped relationship between mean income and fatalities, we show theoretically that income inequality can positively affect fatalities in two ways. Each operates through heterogeneity between road users, and while the direct effect can be expected to evaporate with rising income, the indirect effect may prove to be an externality in that the relationship remains regardless of the level of income. Our model is supported by evidence from 79 countries between 1970 and 2000.