Impatti, adattamento e vulnerabilita Le cause e le responsabilita dei cambiamenti climatici sono state trattate sul numero di ottobre della rivista Cda. Approfondiamo l’argomento presentando il documento: “Cambiamenti climatici 2007: impatti, adattamento e vulnerabilita” votato ad aprile 2007 dal secondo gruppo di lavoro del Comitato Intergovernativo sui Cambiamenti Climatici (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). Si tratta del secondo di tre documenti che compongono il quarto rapporto sui cambiamenti climatici.

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Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability.

The Tragedy of Great Power Politics

Therefore, the seeker after the truth is not one who studies the writings of the ancients and, following his natural disposition, puts his trust in them, but rather the one who suspects his faith in them and questions what he gathers from them, the one who submits to argument and demonstration, and not to the sayings of a human being whose nature is fraught with all kinds of imperfection and de‹ciency. Thus the duty of the man who investigates the writings of scientists, if learning the truth is his goal, is to make himself the enemy of all that he reads, and, applying his mind to the core and margins of its content, attack it from every side. He should also suspect himself as he performs his critical examination of it, so that he may avoid falling into either prejudice or leniency. (Ibn al-Haytham)1

국제정치이론 = Theory of international politics

How does cooperation emerge in a condition of international anarchy? Michael Tomz sheds new light on this fundamental question through a study of international debt across three centuries. Tomz develops a reputational theory of cooperation between sovereign governments and foreign investors. He explains how governments acquire reputations in the eyes of investors, and argues that concerns about reputation sustain international lending and repayment. Tomz's theory generates novel predictions about the dynamics of cooperation: how investors treat first-time borrowers, how access to credit evolves as debtors become more seasoned, and how countries ascend and descend the reputational ladder by acting contrary to investors' expectations. Tomz systematically tests his theory and the leading alternatives across three centuries of financial history. His remarkable data, gathered from archives in nine countries, cover all sovereign borrowers. He deftly combines statistical methods, case studies, and content analysis to scrutinize theories from as many angles as possible. Tomz finds strong support for his reputational theory while challenging prevailing views about sovereign debt. His pathbreaking study shows that, across the centuries, reputations have guided lending and repayment in consistent ways. Moreover, Tomz uncovers surprisingly little evidence of punitive enforcement strategies. Creditors have not compelled borrowers to repay by threatening military retaliation, imposing trade sanctions, or colluding to deprive defaulters of future loans. He concludes by highlighting the implications of his reputational logic for areas beyond sovereign debt, further advancing our understanding of the puzzle of cooperation under anarchy.

The Puzzle of Cooperation in International Debt, from Reputation and International Cooperation: Sovereign Debt across Three Centuries

The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists' Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics. By William Easterly. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001. Pp. xiii + 342. This is an important, controversial, unusual, and accessible book. It has already received a lot of public attention, and it is destined to be an influential and enduring contribution to the development economics literature. The book is important because there is arguably no topic more critical than understanding why so many of the world's poor remain poor, and why a fortunate few countries have "grown out of poverty" in the post-war period. William Easterly has worked for many years in the world's preeminent international development agency (like it or not, that is what the World Bank is). He has been one of the leading intellectual thinkers in the bank, and has published widely in the top economic journals. The book is controversial because it has hit the headlines, with major write-ups in the world's most influential newspapers, including the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune. It is written by a World Bank insider who is critical of donors' development efforts, moreover coming at a time when the bank itself is in a state of flux bordering at times on turmoil. The volume is accessible because it exhibits an all-too-rare capacity among economists to write with a wider audience in mind. The author demonstrates an uncanny knack in distilling complex theory and analytics for a general audience. Finally, it is unusual for features noted below, especially its structure and writing style. If the book has two key messages, they are that "people respond to incentives" and that "growth is good for the poor". These might appear awfully obvious to mainstream economists and to the general community in well-managed, fast-growing economies. But it is surprising how widely these messages have been ignored by governments in poor countries and by international development agencies. The book consists of fourteen chapters, all but the last followed by an "Intermezzo", and is organized into four sections. The first and last chapters and these Intermezzi portray the human dimensions of poverty in the Third World. The two substantive sections look at "Panaceas that Failed" and "People Respond to Incentives". The "panaceas" refer to theories and recipes for rapid growth, which in the author's view, have failed to live up to expectations. The first substantial chapter looks at the disappointing record of international development assistance. In aggregate, it is very difficult to discern a statistical relationship which demonstrates that aid has made a difference. Then Easterly switches to the micro, looking at Ghana, a country full of hope on the threshold of independence (and often likened to Malaysia), but whose per capita income is now little different from that of 1950. The author also attacks the "financing gap" literature, which became popular with the Harrod-Domar growth models, and later with the work of Rostow in the 1960s. This "gaps" literature had largely dropped out of academic discourse by 1980, but we are told here that it lived on in international agencies, and was employed to justify aid programmes. While the author's story in these two chapters is a largely negative one, it needs to be emphasized that in countries with sound economic policies -- that is, much of Southeast Asia until recently -- well-run aid programmes can make a difference. Perhaps more could have been made of this point. Continuing this demolition of an "inputs" approach to growth, Easterly revisits "Solow's Surprise: investment is not the key to growth". The proposition that investment alone is no guarantee of growth is, of course, widely accepted in the academic literature, but it, too, has apparently not percolated through some international financial institutions. There is also a useful, sceptical discussion in this chapter of the total factor productivity (TFP) literature, including a recounting of the astounding Young-Krugman allegation that Singapore recorded zero TFP growth for its first twenty years or so of independence. …

The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists' Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics

A review of recent quantitative studies on the International Monetary Fund reveals that much of the conventional wisdom is incorrect. Recent studies have demonstrated a new degree of methodological rigor, have drawn more heavily upon insights from political science, and have asked a number of new questions. We review studies of participation in IMF programs, design of IMF conditionality, implementation and enforcement of IMF conditions, conventional program effects and catalytic effects. At every stage, we find substantial evidence of the influence of major IMF shareholders, of the Fund’s own organizational imperatives, and of domestic politics within borrowing countries. We conclude that very little is known with certainty about the effects of IMF lending, but that a great deal has been learned about the mechanics of IMF programs that will have to be taken into account in order to obtain unbiased estimates of those effects.

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The International Monetary Fund: A review of the recent evidence

Donor proliferation and the fragmentation of aid delivery is an important problem besetting foreign aid policy. Increased donor coordination is widely seen as a fix to this problem. This article explores theoretically and empirically the collective action problems and incentives that donors face when coordinating their actions, based on the distinction between private and public goods properties of aid. I introduce the concept of lead donorship, develop a measure that accounts for the exclusive and long-lasting ties between a lead donor and a recipient country, and show that lead donorship is in long-term decline. I test my theory combining spatial autoregressive (SAR) models, nonparametric model discrimination techniques, and data on aid delivery channels. I recover evidence of collusion in the provision of private goods aid in the presence of a lead donor, and lack of coordination and competition in the absence of a lead donor.

Compete or Coordinate? Aid Fragmentation and Lead Donorship

Recent debates have focused on the negative role of the proliferation of foreign aid facilities and donor fragmentation for development outcomes and recipient country institutions. This article investigates an overlooked positive side effect of donor proliferation. With an increasing number of donors, exposure to negative aid shocks decreases, as well as the impact of such shocks on violent political conflict. Using data on 106 recipient countries for the years 1970 to 2008 and employing event history and mediation analysis, we find strong evidence that fragmentation significantly reduces the risk for political destabilization associated with aid shocks.

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Martin_Steinwand/publication/273682266_Donor_Fragmentation_Aid_Shocks_and_Violent_Political_Conflict/links/55085b9b0cf27e990e0a85df.pdf

Donor Fragmentation, Aid Shocks, and Violent Political Conflict

Concerns about international terrorism make the stability of failing states central to Western foreign aid policies. This paper explores how donors reduce the volatility of aid to avoid political destabilization of recipient countries. Using a formal model, we show that stability-oriented donors control the risk of conflict, but they never fully eliminate it. Recipient governments can exploit donor preferences for stability through increased rent extraction. As a result, stability-oriented aid reduces the risk of political destabilization only under narrow circumstances. If these conditions are not met, stability aid makes conflict more likely. We present evidence for key predictions of our model.

Foreign aid and political stability

The literature on the institutionalization of international cooperation argues that states include dispute settlement procedures in their agreements to “tie the hands” of states. This paper reverses this thinking and shows that when a regime provides institutionalized dispute settlement, states sometimes seek to undo it. The settlement of maritime boundaries is a case in point. Governed by the Law of the Sea regime, which provides four institutional mechanisms for states to solve disputes, the vast majority of agreements specify bilateral negotiations as the only way to deal with future conflicts. The reason for this is that states pay attention to both the cost and flexibility of conflict resolutions mechanisms. We find that poorer states are more likely than wealthy states to specify bilateral negotiations, the cheapest and most flexible conflict resolution mechanism. Wealth differentials are also associated with greater demands for flexibility.

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Martin C. Steinwand

Papers

The International Monetary Fund: A review of the recent evidence

Compete or Coordinate? Aid Fragmentation and Lead Donorship

Donor Fragmentation, Aid Shocks, and Violent Political Conflict

Foreign aid and political stability

Dispute settlement mechanisms and maritime boundary settlements