For 98 countries in the period 1960–1985, the growth rate of real per capita GDP is positively related to initial human capital (proxied by 1960 school-enrollment rates) and negatively related to the initial (1960) level of real per capita GDP. Countries with higher human capital also have lower fertility rates and higher ratios of physical investment to GDP. Growth is inversely related to the share of government consumption in GDP, but insignificantly related to the share of public investment. Growth rates are positively related to measures of political stability and inversely related to a proxy for market distortions.

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Economic Growth in a Cross Section of Countries

Of the 27 major armed conflicts that occurred in 1999, all but two took place within national boundaries. As an impediment to development, internal rebellion especially hurts the world's poorest countries. What motivates civil wars? Greed or grievance? Collier and Hoeffler compare two contrasting motivations for rebellion: greed and grievance. Most rebellions are ostensibly in pursuit of a cause, supported by a narrative of grievance. But since grievance assuagement through rebellion is a public good that a government will not supply, economists predict such rebellions would be rare. Empirically, many rebellions appear to be linked to the capture of resources (such as diamonds in Angola and Sierra Leone, drugs in Colombia, and timber in Cambodia). Collier and Hoeffler set up a simple rational choice model of greed-rebellion and contrast its predictions with those of a simple grievance model. Some countries return to conflict repeatedly. Are they conflict-prone or is there a feedback effect whereby conflict generates grievance, which in turn generates further conflict? The authors show why such a feedback effect might be present in both greed-motivated and grievance rebellions. The authors' results contrast with conventional beliefs about the causes of conflict. A stylized version of conventional beliefs would be that grievance begets conflict, which begets grievance, which begets further conflict. With such a model, the only point at which to intervene is to reduce the level of objective grievance. Collier and Hoeffler's model suggests that what actually happens is that opportunities for predation (controlling primary commodity exports) cause conflict and the grievances this generates induce dias-poras to finance further conflict. The point of policy intervention here is to reduce the absolute and relative attraction of primary commodity predation and to reduce the ability of diasporas to fund rebel movements. This paper - a product of the Development Research Group - is part of a larger effort in the group to study civil war and criminal violence. For more on this effort, go to www.worldbank.org/research/conflict. Paul Collier may be contacted at pcollier@worldbank.org.

Greed and Grievance in Civil War

This paper compares more direct measures of the institutional environment with both the instability proxies used by Barro (1991) and the Gastil indices, by comparing their effects both on growth and private investment. The results provide substantial support for the position that the institutional roots of growth and convergence are significant. The marked improvement that these new variables represent over existing proxies also suggests that there are substantial returns to future research into variables that reflect the security of property rights and the efficiency with which states determine economic policies and allocate public goods.

Institutions and economic performance: cross‐country tests using alternative institutional measures

This study investigates the causes of civil war, using a new data set of wars during 1960-99. Rebellion may be explained by atypically severe grievances, such as high inequality, a lack of political rights, or ethnic and religious divisions in society. Alternatively, it might be explained by atypical opportunities for building a rebel organization. Opportunity may be determined by access to finance, such as the scope for extortion of natural resources, and for donations from a Diaspora population. Opportunity may also depend upon factors such as geography: mountains and forests may be needed to incubate rebellion. These explanations are tested and find that opportunity provides considerably more explanatory power than grievance. Economic viability appears to be the predominant systematic explanation of rebellion. The results are robust to correction for outliers, alternative variable definition, and variations in estimation method

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Greed and grievance in civil war

We investigate whether income inequality affects subsequent growth in a cross-country sample for 1965-90, using the models of Barro (1997), Bleaney and Nishiyama (2002) and Sachs and Warner (1997), with negative results. We then investigate the evolution of income inequality over the same period and its correlation with growth. The dominating feature is inequality convergence across countries. This convergence has been significantly faster amongst developed countries. Growth does not appear to influence the evolution of inequality over time. Outline

https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/81822/1/02-28.pdf

Economic growth and income inequality

In this wide-ranging study, the authors use 200 years of congressional roll call voting as a framework for an interpretation of important episodes in American political and economic history. By tracing the voting patterns of Congress throughout the country's history, Poole and Rosenthal find that, despite a wide array of issues facing legislators, over 80 percent of a legislator's voting decisions can be attributed to a consistent ideological position ranging from ultraconservatism to ultraliberalism.

Congress: A Political-Economic History of Roll Call Voting

The idea of America as politically polarized--that there is an unbridgeable divide between right and left, red and blue states--has become a cliche. What commentators miss, however, is that increasing polarization in recent decades has been closely accompanied by fundamental social and economic changes--most notably, a parallel rise in income inequality. In Polarized America, Nolan McCarty, Keith Poole, and Howard Rosenthal examine the relationships of polarization, wealth disparity, immigration, and other forces, characterizing it as a dance of give and take and back and forth causality.Using NOMINATE (a quantitative procedure that, like interest group ratings, scores politicians on the basis of their roll call voting records) to measure polarization in Congress and public opinion, census data and Federal Election Commission finance records to measure polarization among the public, the authors find that polarization and income inequality fell in tandem from 1913 to 1957 and rose together dramatically from 1977 on; they trace a parallel rise in immigration beginning in the 1970s. They show that Republicans have moved right, away from redistributive policies that would reduce income inequality. Immigration, meanwhile, has facilitated the move to the right: non-citizens, a larger share of the population and disproportionately poor, cannot vote; thus there is less political pressure from the bottom for redistribution than there is from the top against it. In "the choreography of American politics" inequality feeds directly into political polarization, and polarization in turn creates policies that further increase inequality.

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Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches

A general nonlinear logit model is used to analyze political choice data The model assumes probabilistic voting based on a spatial utility function The parameters of the utility function and the spatial coordinates of the choices and the choosers can all be estimated on the basis of observed choices Ordinary Guttman scaling is a degenerate case of this model Estimation of the model is implemented in the NOMINATE program for one dimensional analysis of two alternative choices with no nonvoting The robustness and face validity of the program outputs are evaluated on the basis of roll call voting data for the US House and Senate

/pdf/a-spatial-model-for-legislative-roll-call-analysis-24cpf5wm6r.pdf

A Spatial Model for Legislative Roll Call Analysis

Congressional roll call voting has been highly structured for most of U.S. history. The structure is revealed by a dynamic, spatial analysis of the entire roll call voting record from 1789 to 1985. The space is characterized by a predominant major dimension with, at times, a significant, but less important second dimension. In the modern era, spatial positions are very stable. This stability is such that, under certain conditions, short run forecasting of roll call votes is possible. Since the end of World War II, changes in congressional voting patterns have occurred almost entirely through the process of replacement of retiring or defeated legislators with new members. Politically, selection is far more important than adaptation.

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Patterns of congressional voting

The transfer of power through the use of military force is a commonplace event in world affairs. Although no two coups d'etat are alike, they all have a common denominator: poverty. We analyze political and economic data from 121 countries during the period 1950–1982 and find that the probability of a government's being overthrown by a coup is significantly influenced by the level of economic well-being. Thus, even authoritarian governments have powerful incentives to promote economic growth, not out of concern for the welfare of their citizens, but because poor economic performance may lead to their removal by force. When the simultaneity of low income and coups is accounted for, we find that the aftereffects of a coup include a heritage of political instability in the form of an increased likelihood of further coups. Although the effect of income on coups is pronounced, we find little evidence of feedback from coups to income growth.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0043887100011072

Keith T. Poole

Papers

Congress: A Political-Economic History of Roll Call Voting

Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches

A Spatial Model for Legislative Roll Call Analysis

Patterns of congressional voting

Poverty, the Coup Trap, and the Seizure of Executive Power