Showing posts from category Iraq.
Show all posts
-
From the Wilson Center:
Petro-Aggression: When Oil Causes War
›By Maria Prebble // Thursday, April 25, 2013
While there has been much research on the effect of valuable natural resource extraction on a state’s domestic development (e.g., the “resource curse”), Wilson Center Fellow Jeff Colgan focuses on how natural resource extraction affects foreign policy. In Petro-Aggression: When Oil Causes War, Colgan finds that “petrostates” – countries where revenue from oil exports exceeds 10 percent of GDP – are twice as likely to engage in inter-state conflict than non-petrostates.
MORE -
Assad Regime, Rebels, and Kurds Vie for Control of Syria’s Oil
›Josh Wood, The New York Times
By ECSP Staff // Tuesday, April 23, 2013
The original version of this article, by Josh Wood, appeared on The New York Times.
Once highly dependent on revenue from petroleum sales, the Syrian government has lost control of many of the country’s major oil fields over the past few months as Kurdish forces and the rebel Free Syrian Army have made significant gains in the east.
MORE -
Guest Contributor:
When Does Oil Cause War? Petro-Aggression and Revolutionary Governments
›By Jeff Colgan // Wednesday, February 6, 2013
One year ago, the United States government froze all property of the Central Bank of Iran and other Iranian financial institutions within the United States. The move was part of a broader effort to compel the Islamic Republic to give up its alleged nuclear weapons program. How is it working out?
MORE -
The Missing Links in the Demographic Dividend
›By Elizabeth Leahy Madsen // Friday, March 9, 2012The “demographic dividend,” a concept that marries population dynamics and development economics, is on the rise in policy circles – Rajiv Shah, Melinda Gates, and African government ministers have all discussed it recently in high-level forums. Most notably for demographers, World Bank Chief Economist Justin Yifu Lin wrote a blog post that focuses on the demographic dividend’s potential to give developing countries a powerful economic boost through declining dependency ratios and a proportionately large working-age population.
MORE
However, as Lin’s post demonstrates, discussions about the dividend often give rise to two common misconceptions: one, that all youthful age structures open an opportunity for the dividend; and two, that once age structure changes are in place, economic benefits will accrue automatically.
When a Youth Bulge Is Not
Population age structure is the key link between demography and economic development. If countries wish to incur the potential economic benefits of the demographic dividend, their age structure must change. While Lin’s post describes these age structure changes in detail, it completely omits a critical step required for them to happen: fertility reduction.
Lin describes sub-Saharan Africa’s youthful population age structure as having a “youth bulge.” But this is a tricky term.
Most researchers use “youth bulge” to describe large cohorts of young adults (typically ages 15 to 29), regardless of the number of children under 15. But as Sarah Staveteig pointed out in ECSP Report 11, a “bulge” shape is only apparent in a population profile when the number of children is smaller than older age groups. For example, the U.S. age structure in 1980 (see figure below) shows a clear “bulge” of young adults due to the drop in average family size during the 1970s after the baby boom of the 1950s and early 60s. This type of youth bulge can trigger a demographic dividend, provided other sound policies are in place, because dependency ratios (the share of dependent children relative to working-age adults) decline, allowing increased savings, productivity, and investment.
Even though it’s often described as having a youth bulge, a country that simply has many young people (like Iraq in the example below) will not incur the potential economic benefits of the demographic dividend. Whether the under-15 cohort is growing or shrinking is key – and for it to shrink, fertility rates must decline first. Dependency ratios do not decline when a large cohort of youth enters the labor market and those youth are followed by even larger, younger cohorts. In that case, a country’s youthful population is on track to continue unabated into the future.
Unfortunately, Lin conflates these two very different demographic scenarios. “In a country with a youth bulge, as the young adults enter the working age, the country’s dependency ratio – that is, the ratio of the non-working-age population to the working-age population – will decline,” Lin writes. He continues:If the increase in the number of working-age individuals can be fully employed in productive activities, other things being equal, the level of average income per capita should increase as a result. The youth bulge will become a demographic dividend. However, if a large cohort of young people cannot find employment and earn satisfactory income, the youth bulge will become a demographic bomb, because a large mass of frustrated youth is likely to become a potential source of social and political instability.
At first, Lin is writing about populations with a true youth bulge – those where the dependency ratio has declined as fertility has declined. As the post correctly explains, the increase in the proportional size of the labor force, if productively employed, leads to increases in income and savings as families tend to have more workers and fewer dependents.
However, in the second part of the paragraph, Lin describes the potential “bomb” effect of a population with a large share of unemployed and frustrated youth. This is linked to a different kind of age structure, one where fertility rates remain high and the size of the cohorts entering the labor market grows year after year. As Henrik Urdal writes in his seminal study of age structure and conflict, “youth bulges in the context of continued high fertility and high dependency make countries increasingly likely to experience armed conflict.” Once dependency ratios decline – as a consequence of fertility decline – the risk of conflict goes down, even while there is still a large share of young adults.
Dependency Differences: South Korea and the DRC
To illustrate, it’s helpful to compare two different age structures that could be characterized by a “youth bulge” but face quite different development trajectories.
The World Bank post cites the example of South Korea, a frequent case study in the demographic dividend literature. South Korea and the other East Asian “Tigers” experienced annual increases in per capita income on the order of six percent between 1965 and 1990. Fertility in Korea declined over the same period from six children per woman to less than two. Studies indicate that such demographic changes were responsible for between one-fourth and two-fifths of the economic growth in the region.In 1980, halfway through the dividend period, nearly half of South Korea’s total labor force was composed of young adults between the ages of 15 and 29, which certainly created a “youth bulge” in the job market. But, importantly, the dependency ratio was on the way down as well: There were 61 dependents (including children and older adults, but mostly children) per 100 working-age adults – down from 81 dependents for every 100 working-age adults in 1960. Children ages 14 and younger comprised about one-third of the country’s total population, a decline from 41 percent in 1960. You can see this “bulge” in the working-age population in South Korea’s population profile for 1980 (see figure to right).
In contrast, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), young adults ages 15 to 29 comprised 54 percent of the total labor force in 2010, about five percentage points higher than South Korea’s share 30 years ago. The key difference is the size of the dependent younger cohort. Currently, children younger than 15 make up 46 percent of the DRC’s total population. Every 100 working-age adults has to economically support 96 dependents, nearly all of whom are children.Of course, a dependency ratio provides an imperfect snapshot of a country’s labor market. Unemployment, income and wage levels, and the rate of female and child participation in the workforce also play important roles. But in a developing economy with a dependency ratio as high as that of the DRC, most families will be hard-pressed to build savings or to invest in their children’s education, and women’s opportunities to generate income will be limited by their child-care responsibilities.
Including the dependency ratio in any discussion of age structure reveals there is little comparison between South Korea 30 years ago and the DRC and many other youthful countries in sub-Saharan Africa today. Women in the DRC have had an average of six children each since 1950, and as long as that fertility rate remains constant, the ratio of dependents to working-age adults will remain essentially equal.
As only six percent of married women in the DRC are using an effective contraceptive method, it is very unlikely that fertility will decline. More than one-quarter of women have an unmet need for family planning, meaning that they have expressed a desire to avoid pregnancy but are not using any contraception. Unless this need is met, fertility will not decline, the dependency ratio will stay high, and the DRC will not have a chance to enjoy the benefits of the demographic dividend. But this caveat is absent from Lin’s post.
More Than Age Structure
The second key misconception about the demographic dividend is that once age structure changes are in place, economic benefits will accrue automatically. Lin thoroughly summarizes the major socioeconomic investments that governments wishing to capitalize on the dividend must make, such as educating young people beyond primary school, improving the health of the population, generating jobs for youth entering the labor market, and shifting employment from agriculture towards manufacturing and service industries.
Other scholars have reviewed the importance of trade openness, flexible labor markets, and stable financial systems that encourage savings and investment – factors that were lacking in Latin America, for example, as its countries achieved a lower dependency ratio in the 1980s and 90s.
As promising as the potential benefits of the demographic dividend may be, they will not be realized without several prerequisites. Before making investments in human capital and other areas of economic development, policymakers must establish policies and programs that promote age structure changes, such as education for girls and the provision of family planning.
In sub-Saharan Africa in particular, the preeminent scholars of the demographic dividend, David Bloom et al, said it best: “If policymakers can urgently place much more emphasis on educating and empowering African girls, who ultimately represent one of the continent’s most important sources of economic and social progress, they can expect their countries to reap corollary rewards.”
Elizabeth Leahy Madsen is a consultant on political demography for the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program and senior technical advisor at Futures Group.
Sources: Bloom, Canning, and Sevilla (2003), Cincotta (2008-09), Gender Action (2011), Goldstone (2008-09), Lin (2012), MEASURE DHS, Staveteig (2005), Tsui and Hebert (2011), UN Population Division, Urdal (2006), World Bank.
Chart Credit: South Korean age structure, 1950, 2010, 2050 (medium variant estimate), data from UN Population Division; Panel A and B, Staveteig (2005); Figures 2 and 3 arranged by Sean Peoples, data from UN Population Division. -
From the Wilson Center:
Is Foreign Aid Worth the Cost?
›By Don Wolfensberger // Wednesday, February 1, 2012“Is foreign aid worth the cost? That’s not really the question unless you’re Ron Paul,” quipped Carol J. Lancaster, dean of the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, at the Wilson Center on January 23. “The real questions are: What do we want to accomplish with our foreign aid? Where should it go? And in what form?”
MORE
Lancaster noted that following World War II, foreign aid became “a two-pronged instrument – one as an instrument of the Cold War and the other as an extension of American values.” It has been a very “intense marriage” between the two, he said, “with one side up and the other side down at different times, as any marriage tends to be.” Truman convinced Congress to provide aid to Greece and Turkey in 1948 to combat communism, and he was able to gain approval for the Marshall Plan by “scaring the wits out of Congress” about the communist threat.
Aid Under Fire
Congressman Donald Payne (N.J.), who is the ranking Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s Subcommittee on Africa, agreed that the Cold War was the principal reason for our foreign aid programs after World War II, as we provided hundreds of billions of dollars in aid to our supporters around the world. But, “It’s different today,” he added. “Since the end of the Cold War, more funds are going for humanitarian and development assistance, but it is still directly linked to our national interests. One in five American jobs are tied to U.S. trade, and the growth of our trading partners is our growth as well.”
Payne cautioned that there is “a new group in the House of Representatives who think we should step out of the world. They’ve told their constituents they are going to cut the budget, and foreign aid is an easy target.” Payne noted that polls show the American people think one-quarter or more of the federal budget goes to foreign aid when it is little more than one percent.
Nevertheless, there has been bipartisan support for former President Bush’s HIV/AIDS initiative in Africa which is showing remarkable results in reducing deaths from the disease. Payne added that aid to Africa is showing results in the number of economies that are doing well despite the global economic downturn.
Payne expressed frustration with the inability to enact a foreign aid authorization bill in the last several Congresses because the measures became weighted down with all manner of policy riders that were both partisan and controversial. Consequently, our foreign relations operations are solely dependent on the annual appropriations bills which tend to become encumbered as well with troublesome riders.
The Dangers of “Nation Building”
Charles O. Flickner, Jr., a 28-year Republican staff member on the Senate Budget Committee and then the Foreign Operations Appropriations Subcommittee in the House, presented a more skeptical view, saying foreign aid is not worth the $35 billion it is costing us each year, even though some of the programs have been successful and should be continued. The biggest problem in recent years, he said, has been the amount of money wasted on projects in Iraq and Afghanistan without adequate planning or execution. Money was being virtually shoveled out the door in amounts the host countries did not have the capacity to absorb, said Flickner, and as a consequence we have witnessed a lot of failed projects and corruption.
Smaller projects, which the U.S. government and private aid donors are better at, have a greater chance for success because they do not overwhelm the capacities of host countries. He cited some of the scholarships and technical training programs available for foreign nationals as being among the most worthwhile in building internal leadership capacity for the future in developing countries.
Rajiv Chandrasekaran agreed on the amount of wasted aid dollars being spent in Iraq and Afghanistan, which he has covered as a foreign correspondent for The Washington Post. He told the story of a small, dirt-poor town in Afghanistan he visited in where the bazaar was bustling with new shops and goods, and people were freely spending money on modern electronics, motor bikes, and clothes. The town was the beneficiary of a massive U.S. aid program that provided seed money for farmers to grow crops and created day labor jobs for the residents of the area. A contractor was authorized to spend $30 million on the economic development of the town during the U.S. counterinsurgency surge and that came to roughly $300 per person. It was clear to the USAID official on the ground and to the reporter that the experiment would not be sustainable over the long-term, even though there was a temporary sense of economic activity and prosperity.
Future Vulnerabilities
The panel seemed to agree that it was unfair to blame USAID for these failures since they were thrown into situations overnight they were not prepared to manage in countries that were not capable of absorbing the assistance being directed at them – all in the midst of ongoing conflict. The real test of whether the new directions being charted by the Obama Administration will work will be on the smaller, more manageable projects in which the host countries have a greater role in shaping and implementing.
Lancaster listed four vulnerabilities in the future course of U.S. foreign aid that should be avoided, including trying to merge our various interests through the State and Defense Departments with our aid programs in countries like Pakistan, where the institutions are weak and corrupt; the danger of creating an entitlement dependency through funding of HIV/AIDS drugs, where we will be guilty of causing deaths if we reduce funding; the danger of attempting to undertake too many initiatives at once, such as food aid, global health, climate change, and science and technology innovations, while simultaneously trying to reform the infrastructure of USAID; and trying too hard to demonstrate results from aid given the difficulty of disentangling causes and effects and gauging success over too short a time frame.
Event Resources:
Don Wolfensberger is director of the Congress Project at the Wilson Center. -
Building Commitment to Family Planning:
Iran: A Seemingly Unlikely Setting for World’s Fastest Demographic Transition
›By Elizabeth Leahy Madsen // Wednesday, January 11, 2012This is the second post in a series profiling the process of building political commitment in countries whose governments have made strong investments in family planning. Read the first post, on Rwanda’s recent rapid demographic changes, here.
To date, only 11 countries outside of the developed world, China, and a handful of small island states have reached the end of the demographic transition, with fertility rates declining from more than four children per woman to replacement level or lower.* Of these, only two countries have completed the transition in 15 years or less – and both might surprise you. One is Cuba, whose government dispensed family planning services to its relatively small population in the 1970s through accessible primary health care facilities and legalized safe abortion eight years before the United States did. The other: Iran.MORE
Following the 1979 revolution, Iran’s new theocracy adopted a socially conservative, pro-natalist outlook. Half of the population lived in rural areas, which typically constrains access to health services. In addition, abortion was illegal in most circumstances. According to the UN, Iranian women had an average of 6.5 children each in the early 1980s and the population was growing nearly four percent annually, a rate high enough for it to double in 19 years.
But, by the early 2000s, Iran’s fertility rate had dropped below two children per woman. The swift changes can be attributed to the efforts of government officials concerned about meeting the employment needs of a growing population, supported by public health experts who wanted to rebuild the eroded family planning program.
A Dramatic Policy ShiftThe turning point came after the end of Iran’s eight-year war with Iraq in 1988. With military demands high – several hundred thousand people were killed during the war – population growth was viewed positively. But as the war ended, policy directives did an about-face.
Although public health officials had framed the need for reinvigorated family planning programs in health-related terms for years, the motivation for government officials to change policy appears to have been economic. The national budget agency informed the prime minister that after nearly a decade of conflict, the country lacked adequate funding to both rebuild and to meet the needs of its people. The prime minister responded quickly, directing that demographic factors be integrated into the new development plan and stating that “Iranians’ standard of living was being eroded by the growth of the country’s population.”
“Pragmatism Has Prevailed Over Pure Ideology”
After convincing their superiors, Iranian government officials who supported family planning faced the added challenge of garnering the backing of the influential religious establishment. Shortly after the revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini officially sanctioned the use of contraception, though his perspective was not universal among clerics. Once the prime minister decided to introduce a national family planning program, officials sought support from additional religious authorities. Opposition was minimal after two key institutions offered endorsements. The High Judicial Council determined that there was “no Islamic barrier to family planning” in late 1988, and the Expediency Council approved the government’s plans soon after.
By late 1989, a new family planning program had been officially introduced. The program’s aims were to lengthen spacing between births; limit pregnancies in the early and late reproductive years; and lower fertility by educating the population and ensuring access to free and diverse contraceptive methods. By the mid-1990s, the government had fully integrated family planning into the existing primary health system.
Iran thus followed the example of other majority-Muslim countries where religion was not an impediment to family planning, including Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, and Oman. Just as in countries where highly Catholic populations have low fertility rates (Italy, Poland, Spain, and many others), religious guidance has been interpreted in varying ways in different settings and is not necessarily a central factor in individual fertility decisions. As Akbar Aghajanian and Amir H. Merhyar write in a summary of Iran’s family planning program, “Pragmatism has prevailed over pure ideology when necessary.”
The Contributions of Women’s Education and a Strong Health System
A new policy orientation was the critical first step, but successful implementation was necessary for Iran’s demographic trajectory to change in response. Fortunately, the government had some advantages in rolling out its new program, namely a strong existing health system, a history of past efforts to promote family planning, and an educated female population among whom demand for contraception was high.Rural development became a priority of the government after the revolution and resulted in improved access to an array of services. In rural areas, community health workers receive two years of training to provide family planning services along with other preventative care and treatment. Services are also available at rural health “houses,” urban clinics, and higher-level centers around the country.
The status of women has also played a major role. A research exercise conducted by IIASA estimated that improvements in educational attainment among women were responsible for about one-third of Iran’s fertility decline between 1980 and 2005. Women’s literacy was already rising during the period of the revolution and reached 74 percent by 1996, while attitudes toward female employment became more supportive. By the late 1990s, new classes of university students included more women than men. The response to the 1989 program indicated that women clearly had an unmet demand for family planning. Use of modern contraception jumped from 31 percent in 1989 to 51 percent just five years later, then rose more slowly over the subsequent decade.
A Dividend Squandered?
The rapid changes in Iran’s age structure, thanks to declining fertility, have opened a window of opportunity for the country to boost economic growth through lower dependency ratios – a phenomenon called the demographic dividend. However, the dividend is not an automatic bonus, and Iran’s capacity to capitalize on its demographic change is questionable.
The unemployment rate among young people today is over 20 percent, indicating that the economy is not generating sufficient jobs, which is a prerequisite to improving productivity. This inopportune climate may even contribute to a further decline in the fertility rate: Some observers have suggested that the country’s economic troubles and rising costs of living have motivated young people to delay marriage and have smaller families. “Unemployment and high costs of living, coupled with social and political restrictions, have made [life] increasingly difficult for young Iranians,” Farzaneh Roudi of the Population Reference Bureau (PRB) explained in a blog post last year.
Given Iran’s challenges in producing adequate jobs and other economic benefits for its population, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s recent unusual pronouncements on population issues are especially puzzling. Last year, Ahmadinejad introduced a pro-natalist policy offering direct payments to each child born, continuing until they reach adulthood, and later suggested that girls should marry at age 16 or 17.
But despite a high level of international media attention, most observers expect the policy to have little impact. Widespread adoption of family planning has become entrenched in society: 60 percent of Iranian women now use a modern contraceptive method. As PRB’s Roudi wrote in response to Ahmadinejad’s proposal, “Iranian women and men have gotten used to exercising their reproductive rights and would expect to be able to continue to do so.”
*The 11 countries that have achieved replacement fertility or lower outside of developed regions, China, and small island states are Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, Cuba, Iran, Lebanon, Myanmar, Thailand, Tunisia, and the United Arab Emirates.
Elizabeth Leahy Madsen is a consultant on political demography for the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program and senior technical advisor at Futures Group.
Look for related analysis on the political implications of Iran’s changing age structure by Richard Cincotta on New Security Beat soon.
Sources: Abbasi-Shavazi, Lutz, Hosseini-Chavoshi and Samir (2008), Abbasi-Shavazi (2002), Aghajanian and Merhyar (1999), Christian Science Monitor, GlobalSecurity.org, The New York Times, Noble and Potts (1996), Population Reference Bureau, Roudi-Fahimi (2002), UN Population Division, World Bank.
Image Credit: “بیست و پنجم خرداد ۸,” courtesy of flickr user Recovering Sick Soul (Nima Fatemi); charts arranged by Sean Peoples and Elizabeth Leahy Madsen. -
Guest Contributor:
Do High Food Prices Cause Social Unrest?
›By Marc F. Bellemare // Thursday, January 5, 2012In March 2011, a senior Brookings Institution official wrote that “the crux of the food price challenge is about price volatility, rather than high prices per se” and that “[i]t is the rapid and unpredictable changes in food prices that wreak havoc on markets, politics, and social stability.”
In a recent research paper, however, I use monthly data on food prices and news reports of social unrest worldwide to tease out the causal relationship between food prices and social unrest. The results indicate that it is rising food prices that cause social unrest and that increases in food price volatility are actually associated with decreases in the number of food riots. It thus would be a critical mistake to work toward price stabilization instead of curbing rising food prices.MORE
Consumers, Producers, and Social Unrest
If you have taken a principles of economics class, you know that everything else equal, an increase in the price of a good means that you can afford less of that good. So if you value a given good, the consequence of an increase in the price of that good is that you are worse off.
If you live in the United States, your household dedicates about 13 percent of its budget to food. But if instead you lived in a developing country, that figure would be well over 50 percent.
It should thus come as no surprise that increases in the price of food are especially bad for the poor in developing countries.
This is true for urban households, who are almost all net consumers of food, but also for many rural households who, for a variety of reasons – ranging from failures of the credit, input, or land markets to adverse meteorological conditions – fail to produce enough to feed themselves and are also net consumers of food.
There are many more net consumers than there are net producers of food worldwide. For those net consumers of food, rising food prices can have disastrous consequences. Worse, the greater the share of its budget a household dedicates to food, the more disastrous the consequence of a rise in food prices for that household (Deaton, 1989).
Last March, Annia Ciezadlo, a writer whose memoir Day of Honey explores the social importance of food in the Middle East, wrote in an article for Foreign Affairs:Change is sweeping through the Middle East today, but one thing remains the same: the region once known as the Fertile Crescent is now the world’s most dependent on imported grain. Of the top 20 wheat importers for 2010, almost half are Middle Eastern countries. The list reads like a playbook of toppled and teetering regimes: Egypt, Algeria, Iraq, Morocco, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Tunisia.
Indeed, after attaining a peak during the summer of 2008, food prices started rising rapidly again in the second half of 2010 to hit an all-time high in March of 2011.
For decades, many of these regimes relied on food subsidies to ensure stability (…). But over the past several years, grain prices reached record levels, and these appeasement policies lost their luster. In Tunisia, pro-democracy demonstrations began in late December 2010 with protesters brandishing baguettes. In just a few months, a wave of uprisings rippled across the region, toppling Tunisian President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali and Egypt’s longtime ruler, Hosni Mubarak.
Likewise, as illustrated in figure 1 above, the 2008 and 2011 spikes in food prices (denoted by the red line) coincided with spikes in the number of food riots reported in the news (denoted by the blue line).
Correlation Is Not Causation
But as I constantly remind the students in my development seminar, correlation is not causation, and a key component of critical thinking is the ability to question correlations presented as causal claims. In other words, social unrest may lead to high food prices just as much as the opposite is true.
In my paper, using a statistical technique called instrumental variables estimation, I attempt to identify one side of this relationship by first conditioning food prices on the number of natural disasters worldwide (i.e., droughts, episodes of extreme temperature, floods, insect infestations, storms, volcanic eruptions, and wildfires). Not only do natural disasters constitute shocks to the supply of and demand for food, they presumably affect social unrest only through food prices. In principle, this statistical apparatus allows teasing out the potential causal relationship flowing from food prices to social unrest from the correlation between the two.
Intuitively, this is possible because conditioning food prices on natural disasters (which are themselves uncorrelated with social unrest) allows eliminating the variation in food prices that is purely due to variations in social unrest.
The results are fairly robust: to be sure, rising food prices result in more instances of social unrest, and this remains true whether:- The price of food is considered broadly or the scope is narrowed to only the price of cereals, which constitute the bulk of an average developing-country diet;
- The food crises of 2008 and 2010-2011 are controlled for; or
- Alternative definitions of what constitutes a natural disaster are considered.
This is likely because unlike food producers, food consumers tend to slightly benefit from food price volatility.
Food producers make production decisions on the basis of expected prices, long before uncertainty over food prices is resolved (Sandmo, 1971); volatility therefore is something producers would like to avoid, and so they typically favor price stabilization policies.
Food consumers, however, make consumption decisions knowing exactly what food prices are at that moment, and so an increase in the uncertainty surrounding food prices means they might get to enjoy relative price discounts between food commodities (Turnovsky et al., 1980). This underappreciated theoretical point has recently found empirical support.
Note, however, how I avoid causal language in the case of food price volatility. That’s because my data do not allow establishing whether there is a causal relationship between food price volatility and social unrest, and the most that can be said is that the two are correlated.
Policy Implications
What does this mean for policy? First, for domestic policy makers who want to prevent social unrest, it is crucial to ensure that food is affordable.
In many cases, this means not doing away with food subsidies for urban consumers (Bates, 1981). This is especially true in places where people already have other reasons to be upset, such as countries with high rates of unemployment. Here, both Tunisia and Egypt at the end of 2010 come to mind.
Second, if international policy makers want to prevent social unrest, it is better to work toward preventing sharp increases in food prices rather than preventing increases in food price volatility, as Chris Barrett and I argued in Foreign Affairs last summer.
Download “Rising Food Prices, Food Price Volatility, and Political Unrest.”
Marc F. Bellemare is an assistant professor at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy.
Sources: Bates (1981), Bellemare et al. (2011), Deaton (1989), Food and Agriculture Organization, Foreign Affairs, Hoisington Management, Poor Economics, Sandmo (1971), The Brookings Institution, Turnovsky et al. (1980).
Chart Credit: Marc F. Bellemare; video credit: Voice of America News. -
Reading Radar:
Sanitation and Water MDGs in the Middle East and North Africa: Missing the Target?
›By Lauren Herzer // Friday, December 9, 2011Goal 7, Target 10 of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) is to “halve, by 2015, the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation.” The Joint Monitoring Programme (JMP), established by the UN to monitor progress towards this goal, has twice concluded (in 2008 and 2010) that the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) are in good shape to meet this target. However, a new article in Development and Change, “The Politics of Assessment: Water and Sanitation MDGs in the Middle East,” by Neda Zawahri, Jeannie Sowers, and Erika Weinthal, argues that the JMP’s “reliance on classifying ‘improved’ and ‘unimproved’ water and sanitation infrastructure, through infrequent household surveys, has produced misleading assessments that fail to capture the extensive water quality and sanitation problems plaguing the MENA.”
MORE
The authors compared the findings of the JMP with a variety of data sources – participatory assessments, reports from other UN agencies, donor projects, domestic ministries and agencies, and academic research – and found major contradictions between the progress reported by the JMP and the situation on the ground. In one example, the authors write that “while the JMP considers piped household water as an improvement in water coverage, it fails to differentiate between ‘full’ coverage and ‘partial’ coverage, that is, household water supplies available only a few hours a week.” And the authors point out that according to UN-Habitat, “the availability of piped water does not necessarily translate into safe drinking water, as water may become contaminated before it reaches the tap.”
As a result of the weakness of the indicators used by the JMP, household surveys conducted by the JMP in the MENA region “[do] not adequately capture the quality of drinking water,” the authors write, and efforts to address this inadequacy through more comprehensive testing of municipal water samples were deemed “too complex to be routinely employed through the world” and “prohibitively expensive.”
“International organizations and national leaderships in the MENA lack substantial incentives to adopt more accurate assessments for safe water and sanitation,” Zawahri et al. conclude. The need to generate comparable data across time and space has trumped the importance of “gauging access, quality, and affordability of water and sanitation.” -
From the Wilson Center:
Preparing for the Impact of a Changing Climate on U.S. Humanitarian and Disaster Response
›By Kellie Furr // Wednesday, July 13, 2011Climate-related disasters could significantly impact military and civilian humanitarian response systems, so “an ounce of prevention now is worth a pound of cure in the future,” said CNA analyst E.D. McGrady at the Wilson Center launch of An Ounce of Preparation: Preparing for the Impact of a Changing Climate on U.S. Humanitarian and Disaster Response. The report, jointly published by CNA and Oxfam America, examines how climate change could affect the risk of natural disasters and U.S. government’s response to humanitarian emergencies. [Video Below]
MORE
Connecting the Dots Between Climate Change, Disaster Relief, and Security
The frequency of – and costs associated with – natural disasters are rising in part due to climate change, said McGrady, particularly for complex emergencies with underlying social, economic, or political problems, an overwhelming percentage of which occur in the developing world. In addition to the prospect of more intense storms and changing weather patterns, “economic and social stresses from agricultural disruption and [human] migration” will place an additional burden on already marginalized communities, he said.
Paul O’Brien, vice president for policy and campaigns at Oxfam America said the humanitarian assistance community needs to galvanize the American public and help them “connect the dots” between climate change, disaster relief, and security.
As a “threat multiplier,” climate change will likely exacerbate existing threats to natural and human systems, such as water scarcity, food insecurity, and global health deterioration, said Vice Admiral Lee Gunn, USN (ret.), president of CNA’s Institute for Public Research. Major General Richard Engel, USAF (ret.), of the National Intelligence Council identified shifting disease patterns and infrastructural damage as other potential security threats that could be exacerbated by climate change.
“We must fight disease, fight hunger, and help people overcome the environments which they face,” said Gunn. “Desperation and hopelessness are…the breeding ground for fanaticism.”
U.S. Response: Civilian and Military Efforts
The United States plays a very significant role in global humanitarian assistance, “typically providing 40 to 50 percent of resources in a given year,” said Marc Cohen, senior researcher on humanitarian policy and climate change at Oxfam America.
The civilian sector provides the majority of U.S. humanitarian assistance, said Cohen, including the USAID Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA) and the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration. These organizations provide leadership, funding, and food aid to developing countries in times of crisis, but also beforehand: “The internal rationale [of the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance] is to reduce risk and increase the resilience of people to reduce the need for humanitarian assistance in the future,” said Edward Carr, climate change coordinator at USAID’s Bureau for Democracy, Conflict, and Humanitarian Assistance.
The U.S. military complements and strengthens civilian humanitarian assistance efforts by accessing areas that civilian teams cannot reach. The military can utilize its heavy lift capability, in-theater logistics, and command and control functions when transportation and communications infrastructures are impaired, said McGrady, and if the situation calls for it, they can also provide security. In addition, the military could share lessons learned from its considerable experience planning for complex, unanticipated contingencies with civilian agencies preparing for natural disasters.
“Forgotten Emergencies”
Already under enormous stress, humanitarian assistance and disaster response systems have persistent weaknesses, such as shortfalls in the amount and structure of funding, poor coordination, and lack of political gravitas, said Cohen.
Food-related aid is over-emphasized, said Cohen: “If we break down the shortfalls, we see that appeals for food aid get a better response than the type of response that would build assets and resilience…such as agricultural bolstering and public health measures.” Food aid often does not draw on local resources in developing countries, he said, which does little to improve long-term resilience.
“Assistance is not always based on need…but on short-term political considerations,” said Cohen, asserting that too much aid is supplied to areas such as Afghanistan and Iraq, while “forgotten emergencies,” such as the Niger food crisis, receive far too little. Furthermore, aid distribution needs to be carried out more carefully at the local scale as well: During complex emergencies in fragile states, any perception of unequal assistance has the potential to create “blowback” if the United States is identified with only one side of a conflict.
Engel added that many of the problems associated with humanitarian assistance will be further compounded by increasing urbanization, which concentrates people in areas that do not have adequate or resilient infrastructure for agriculture, water, or energy.
Preparing for Unknown Unknowns
A “whole of government approach” that utilizes the strengths of both the military and civilian humanitarian sectors is necessary to ensure that the United States is prepared for the future effects of climate change on complex emergencies in developing countries, said Engel.
In order to “cut long-term costs and avoid some of the worst outcomes,” the report recommends that the United States:
Cohen singled out “structural budget issues” that pit appropriations for protracted emergencies in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, and Darfur against unanticipated emergencies, like the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. Disaster-risk reduction investments are not a “budgetary trick” to repackage disaster appropriations but a practical way to make more efficient use of current resources, he said: “Studies show that the return on disaster-risk reduction is about seven to one – a pretty good cost-benefit ratio.”- Increase the efficiency of aid delivery by changing the budgetary process;
- Reduce the demand by increasing the resilience of marginal (or close-to-marginal) societies now;
- Be given the legal authority to purchase food aid from local producers in developing countries to bolster delivery efficiency, support economic development, and build agricultural resilience;
- Establish OFDA as the single lead federal agency for disaster preparedness and response, in practice as well as theory;
- Hold an OFDA-led biannual humanitarian planning exercise that is focused in addressing key drivers of climate-related emergencies; and,
- Develop a policy framework on military involvement in humanitarian response.
Edward Carr said that OFDA is already integrating disaster-risk reduction into its other strengths, such as early warning systems, conflict management and mitigation, democracy and governance, and food aid. However, to build truly effective resilience, these efforts must be tied to larger issues, such as economic development and general climate adaptation, he said.
“What worries me most are not actually the things I do know, but the things we cannot predict right now,” said Carr. “These are the biggest challenges we face.”
“Pakistan Floods: thousands of houses destroyed, roads are submerged,” courtesy of flickr user Oxfam International. -
From the Wilson Center:
Admiral Mullen: “Security Means More Than Defense”
›Inaugural Lee Hamilton Lecture at the Wilson Center
By Schuyler Null // Thursday, May 26, 2011Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen delivered the inaugural talk in the Lee Hamilton Lecture Series on Civil Discourse and Democracy at the Wilson Center yesterday where he spoke on the importance of “taking the long-view” on U.S. engagement with the world and the changing field of 21st century geopolitics.
MORE
Mullen, whose aides, Captain Wayne Porter and Colonel “Puck” Mykleby, wrote the recently launched Mr. Y paper on a new national strategic narrative, echoed many of the same sentiments.
“[The Mr. paper] has some interesting things to say about how we are seeing a shift away from 20th century concepts of power and control to that of promoting strength and influence,” Mullen said. “Frankly, in this small, flatter, and faster world, I think any nation that believes it can, in a very clinical way, control events does so at their own peril.”
“The narrative also happens to share my long-held belief that we must remain engaged internationally if we wish to pursue the world that our children [and] our grandchildren deserve,” he continued:As challenging as engaging others with different views may be, the alternative of abandoning these partners in these regions is far worse. We’ve gone down that road before, and it is one that leads to isolation and resentment, ultimately making our nation less secure as we deceive ourselves into believing that ignoring these challenges will somehow make them go away.
Mullen also agreed with the Mr. Y authors’ view on adopting a more holistic view of national security:
…
Until we restore a sense of hope in these challenged regions, we will see again and again that security without prosperity is ultimately unsustainable.Wayne and Puck put it well when they said we must recognize that security means more than defense. And sustaining security requires adaptation and evolution, the leverage of converging interests, and interdependencies. We must accept that competitors are not necessarily adversaries and that a winner does not demand a loser.
The military’s energy initiatives are an important focus as well, Mullen said. “We’re the biggest consumer of energy in the U.S. government…and I don’t think we’ll ever get to a position where that’s not the case, but we certainly ought to recognize that and figure out a way to do it more effectively, efficiently, and at a much reduced cost.”
What we learned in Iraq is “there were too many people getting killed in long convoys,” Mullen said. The Marines were able to adapt to that threat by developing self-contained green cooling kits, and “that’s where we’re headed,” he said. “Our focus on and investments in the green world has taken off.”
“Now it is really mainstream: The service chiefs, combatant commanders, [they] talk about it,” Mullen continued. “There are investments being made, both from an S&T; standpoint – science and technology – as well as research and development.”
Read the transcript in its entirety here for the Chairman’s remarks on the continued importance of the UN, G-20, and NATO; the short-term intractability of challenges in Iran and North Korea; the rise of China; continued American military dominance; the defense budget; and the Arab Spring, which he called the “most significant change afoot in the world today.”
Photo Credit: Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen, courtesy of David Hawxhurst/Wilson Center. -
Ten Billion: UN Updates Population Projections
›Assumptions on Peak Growth Shattered
By Schuyler Null // Thursday, May 12, 2011
The numbers are up: The latest projections from the UN Population Division estimate that world population will reach 9.3 billion by 2050 – a slight bump up from the previous estimate of 9.1 billion. The most interesting change however is that the UN has extended its projection timeline to 2100, and the picture at the end of the century is of a very different world. As opposed to previous estimates, the world’s population is not expected to stabilize in the 2050s, instead rising past 10.1 billion by the end of the century, using the UN’s medium variant model.
MORE -
From the Wilson Center:
A New Security Narrative: What’s America’s Story for the 21st Century?
›By John Milewski // Monday, May 9, 2011We rarely had to question our place in the world during World War II or the Cold War when good guys and bad guys were easier to identify. A clear narrative, whether in the form of opposing Hitler or containing the spread of “The Evil Empire,” fueled our sense of global mission. Sure there were disagreements, but the big picture (and the big enemy) loomed large.
MORE
Our sense of realities, large and small, begins with the stories that frame our understanding of the events around us. The fall of the USSR took the wind out of the sails of our mythic sense of purpose. We were still “us,” but we now lacked a “them.”
A security narrative often emerges from our collective sense of threat assessment. It’s not only about what we stand for, but also what we stand against. On that fateful day of September 11, 2001, many believed that we had found the enemy that would provide the story lacking from our national security narrative since the fall of the Soviet empire. But an ill-defined foe lacking a nation-state home has only contributed to our post-Cold War drift. When we ask ourselves why we are committing military might in Libya (or Afghanistan, or Iraq), we’re really asking bigger questions. What is our purpose in the world? What is the story that defines our friends and our foes? And what does that story tell us about when to sit back or step up? When to watch or when to act?
The lack of a storyline also gives those who hate us the opportunity to define us as evil. So it becomes ever more urgent to start the conversation and to provide a non-partisan forum for what is bound to be a difficult deliberation. When Jane Harman left Congress to accept the leadership post at the Wilson Center, she brought her sense that toxic partisanship prevents Congress from addressing the biggest questions facing the nation in a productive and nonpartisan manner. Under her leadership, the Wilson Center has begun the “National Conversation” series to tackle the toughest issues.
The recently held inaugural event showed great promise. Two active military officers, Captain Wayne Porter (USN) and Colonel Mark Mykleby (USMC), writing under the pseudonym, “Mr. Y,” provided the framework for the discussion. Their vision for a new U.S. security story was presented in a white paper titled, “A National Strategic Narrative.” Their stated purpose is to provide a framework through which to view policy decisions well into the 21st century.
The encounter was lively and challenging, sometimes provocative, but always civil. I can summarize the immediate outcome by reporting a consensus that a narrative is missing and needed. It was a good start, but the discussion needs to continue until we reach a national consensus and not just one among five panelists and a moderator. I will not go into great detail in recapping the arguments and ideas presented, but will instead offer a contribution from each participant to whet your appetite.
Anne-Marie Slaughter, Princeton professor and former Director of Policy Planning for the U.S. Department of State began the session with a summary of the white paper, describing the changing nature of power and influence:We were never able to control international events but we had a much better possibility during the Cold War when you essentially had a bipolar world with two principal actors than we do in a world of countless state and non-state actors. Nobody controls anything in the 21st century, indeed it’s just not a very good century to be – it’s not a good time to be a control freak. [Laughter] Whether it’s your e-mail or global events it’s sort of the same problems. What you can do is influence outcomes. So we have to start by saying it’s an open system; you can’t control it but you can build up your credible influence.
Brent Scowcroft, National Security Advisor to two U.S. presidents, provided an historical framework for the discussion:I think we’re facing a historical discontinuity. The Treaty of Westphalia recognized the existence of the nation-state system codified it and so on. That was a replacement for the feudal system where our sovereignty was vague, divided between kings and princes and landowners and religious leaders. It created a new system and I think the epitome of the nation-state system was the 20th century. I think that globalization writ large is changing that system and globalization is eroding national borders. The financial crisis of 2008 showed us we’ve got a global economic system, what happened in one country spread immediately around. It also showed we don’t have a global way to deal with a global economic situation. Now, this force of globalization to me the best way to look at it is akin to the force of industrialization 250 years ago. Industrialization really created the modern nation state with a lot more power over its citizens to deal with issues than the earlier Westphalia state system had. And it brought the state together. It made it more powerful. Globalization is reacting the same way but in the opposite direction. It is diluting the power of the nation state to deal with the important things.
Thomas Friedman, Pulitzer-prize winning columnist for The New York Times, described the difference between virtual and real action:Exxon Mobil, they’re not on Facebook, they’re just in your face. [Laughter] Peabody Coal, they don’t have a chatroom. They’re in the cloakroom of the U.S. Congress with bags of money. So if you want to change the world, you gotta get out of Facebook and into somebody’s face whether that’s in the U.S. Congress or Tahrir Square. You’ll say, why I blogged on it. I blogged on it, really? That’s like firing a mortar into the Milky Way Galaxy, okay. [Laughter] There is a faux sense of activism out there that is really dangerous. The world, your world, may be digital but politics is still analog and we’ve kind of gotten away from that. Egypt changed. Yes, Facebook was hugely important in organizing people, but the fundamental change happened because a million people showed up in Tahrir Square.
Steve Clemons, founder of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation, added this thought on the essence of globalization:What globalization really is, is the disruption of cartels. What blogging is, individual blogging is saying is, I’m not gonna wait for The New York Times editor to tell me no any more or [laughter] to say yes three weeks from now. You know, it is the disruption of cartels and that is happening in every sector of society.
Robert Kagan, senior fellow with The Brookings Institution and a former State Department Policy Planning Officer, cautioned against rushing to utopian conclusions about the impact of our new levels of interconnectedness:Let me just give you an example of how even something new doesn’t necessarily change things the way we want them to or the way we expect them to. I’m positive by the way that human nature is not new. So you’re kind of dealing with the same beast, and I use the term advisably, as you’ve been dealing with for millennia. Let’s talk about the fact that everyone can communicate with each other on the internet. You know, when people communicate with each other especially across national boundaries sometimes it makes them grow closer. Sometimes it makes them hate each other more. If you read the Internet in China now it’s hyper nationalistic. Now, you can argue that because that’s where the government channel said and because they don’t let anybody else or anything else or you could say the Internet is a great vehicle for the Chinese people to express their hatred of the Japanese people. It certainly is doing that now. So does that mean the Internet is going to bring nations closer and solve problems? Not necessarily.
Representative Keith Ellison (D-MN), talked about the expectations of youth and how demographics will be a key consideration when defining a narrative:The Middle East is on my mind a lot these days, what it means if you have all these societies where 50 percent of the population is under 18 years old? You know this is – this has big implications. I mean, this is a demographic reality that is going to have vast implications for the United States. So one thing is it’s not going away because lots of these people who are 18 years old, their cohort just moves through. You know, they’re going to be there a long time and they have demands, they’re going to have needs, they’re going to have expectations. You mentioned justice. They expect us to act justly. And I, when people talk about anti-Americanism, for me part of what’s going on is unmet expectations not just ‘we don’t like it.’
For this abbreviated summary of the discussion, I give the final cautionary word to Steve Clemons, who had this to say in response to an audience question about how to begin the process of constructing a new narrative:This is a town of risk-averse institutions, a town of inertia, a town of vested interests. It’s not a town that really embraces the notion of how do you pivot very quickly and rapidly in a different direction. So, fundamentally you need to begin putting out narratives like this.
A transcript and video of the event is available from the Wilson Center and additional coverage can also be found right here on The New Security Beat.
John Milewski is the host of Dialogue Radio and Television at the Woodrow Wilson Center and can also be followed on The Huffington Post or Twitter.
Photo Credit: Adapted from “1989 – Berlin, Germany,” courtesy of flickr user MojoBaer. -
From the Wilson Center:
Tunisia Predicted: Demography and the Probability of Liberal Democracy in the Greater Middle East
›By Christina Daggett // Wednesday, April 6, 2011In 2008, demographer Richard Cincotta predicted that between 2010 and 2020 the states along the northern rim of Africa – Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt – would each reach a demographically measurable point where the presence of at least one liberal democracy (and perhaps two), among the five, would not only be possible, but probable. Recent months have brought possible first steps to validate that prediction. [Video Below]
MORE
At a Wilson Center event on March 24, Cincotta, a consultant with the Environmental Change and Security Program and demographer-in-residence at the Stimson Center, discussed his predictions based on a method described in the ECSP Report 13 article, “Half a Chance: Youth Bulges and Transitions to Liberal Democracy.” Discussant Mathew Burrows, counselor at the National Intelligence Council, said Cincotta’s work demonstrates that “the demographic tool is essential” to analysts and policymakers.
A Demographic Lunch Break
The third wave of democracy, which, according to political scientist Samuel Huntington, ended in the early 1990s after the fall of communism, is not over, Cincotta said. Instead, liberalization was “taking a demographic lunch break,” while countries advanced along the demographic transition from high birth and death rates to low.
In particular, what many Western political scientists missed, Cincotta said, was the “quiet” reproductive revolution taking place in North Africa. With a lower fertility rate than the United States, Tunisia’s fertility decline was the fastest and the first, followed by Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, and Syria.
When populations are young, political violence is more likely, Cincotta said. Citizens and elites are therefore willing to make a Hobbesian bargain, trading political rights and civil liberties for security.
“On the other hand,” Cincotta said, “net benefits for liberalization should increase as age structures mature, when political violence becomes less likely, and more people are educated, and when the social mood calms.” At this point, citizens and the commercial and military elites are likely to question the need for an authoritarian government and reject the costs – in terms of civil liberties, political rights and corruption – that they bear, said Cincotta, noting that this calculation may have been expressed explicitly when General Ammar sided with protesters instead of President Ben Ali.
By examining the age structure of countries at the time they achieved a “free” rating in Freedom House’s annual Freedom of the World assessments, Cincotta developed a relationship that used a measure of the population’s age structure to calculate the probability of a stable liberal democracy. He found that, historically, when the proportion of youth (those aged 15-29 years) dropped to around 40 percent of the total working age population (those aged 15-64 years) states had an even chance – in other words, a 50 percent probability – of being stable liberal democracies. So, in any group at this particular stage of age structural maturity, analysts should expect about half to be liberal democracies.
Between 2010 and 2020, each of the North African countries will hit this point. Thus, if this region acted like East Asia and Latin America, there is roughly a 97 percent chance that at least one North African state would end the decade as a liberal democracy.
From this analysis, Cincotta found that Tunisia would have a 50 percent chance of being a stable liberal democracy in 2011. Algeria reaches this point in 2014, Morocco in 2015, and Egypt in 2018. Using the same formula, he projected a few countries outside the North African region; Iran will reach the 50-50 mark in 2014, Syria in 2025, Iraq in 2035, and Yemen in 2045.
Cincotta cautioned that neither Tunisia nor Egypt are, to date, liberal democracies, and whether they can achieve (and maintain) that status remains to be seen. Similarly, he advised the international community to temper their expectations for other countries’ democratization based on their stage in their demographic transition.
Demography as a Tool
“While there’s a general understanding within the policy and analytic communities about rapid change, it’s still very hard for analysts to really think about discontinuities and predicting discontinuities,” said Burrows. Until the events in Tunisia, analysts believed the Middle East and North Africa region was “unique” and “immune to any democratization,” he said; discontinuities, such as rapid regime change or massive democratization movements, were considered unlikely.
“Demography is an extremely valuable tool” for helping policymakers figure out where and when the next major world event will happen, said Burrows, praising Cincotta’s work. Being able to project out 20 or 30 years “is about as certain as you can get,” he said, explaining why many involved in strategic foresight are now gravitating to political demography for insights.
Going forward, the U.S. government should seek to understand the relationship between demographics and other trends and dynamics, such as personalities and institutions, said Burrows. “There is a real appetite among policymakers” for understanding demography, he said, because it gives them more structure than political science narratives.
Image credit: “032,” courtesy of flickr user Nasser Nouri.
Sources: The New York Times. -
Watch: Richard Cincotta on Political Demography and Unrest in the Middle East
›By Schuyler Null // Wednesday, March 9, 2011“Countries that have a high proportion of young people are typically more prone to political violence,” said demographer-in-residence at the Stimson Center, Richard Cincotta, in this interview with ECSP. “That is, not necessarily international war [but] internal conflict, which may take different forms,” including civil and ethnic strife, domestic terrorism, and violent political demonstrations.MORE
The role of unemployed and angry youths in the recent unrest that has swept the Middle East has received a great deal of coverage, but though the region in general is very young, some countries are more so than others.
Tunisia (median age of 29) is actually well into its demographic transition, where fertility declines towards replacement level. “Fertility – the number of children women have in their lifetime – is now lower than it is in the United States,” said Cincotta. As a result, Tunisia’s prospects for achieving a stable, liberal democracy – based on the historical relationship between age structure and political freedoms (see Cincotta’s full post on Tunisia and the two follow-ups for a more complete treatment of that relationship) – are about even.
In contrast, Egypt’s age structure remains young (median age of 24) and Yemen’s (median age of 17) is extremely young. “Those difference are very stark,” said Cincotta, and they play out in the risk of political violence: Tunisia is less likely to experience continuing political violence; Egypt, more so; and Yemen, even more likely.
The relationships between age structure and political violence and the emergence of democratic institutions can be useful in other conflict-prone regions as well. “Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, the Palestinian Authority, most of the central band of sub-Saharan Africa – from Nigeria to the Congo, to Kenya and Ethiopia – we know that these countries are volatile, we’re not always sure why,” said Cincotta. But “age structure gives you a clue, because it tells you something about a lot of barriers that are important to development.”
Sources: UN Population Division. -
What’s Behind Iraq’s Day of Rage? It’s Pretty Basic
›By Schuyler Null // Friday, March 4, 2011Iraq’s “Day of Rage” – a phenomenon that has swept the Middle East since Tunisia’s “Jasmine Revolution” – reportedly claimed the lives of nearly 20 people last week. But though the protests may have been inspired by the current broader movement in the region, they are also a symptom of long-standing grievances ordinary Iraqis have had with their government since the American invasion, including lack of public services like access to clean water and especially, reliable electricity.
MORE
While these protests alone are unlikely to lead to revolution, they reveal basic livelihood challenges that neither the United States nor the Maliki government have effectively addressed.
The protests in Baghdad and more than 10 other cities were the largest since last summer, when demonstrations over access to electricity led to the death of two protestors in Basra. The New Security Beat spoke to Iraq’s first Minister of the Environment, Mishkat Al Moumin, after those protests to ask her about the lack of services and Iraq’s other non-security challenges, including water security, women’s empowerment, and demographics. She said that decentralizing decision-making power might help alleviate pressure on the government and provide more effective local services:Enacting policies at the local level establishes a sense of ownership among local communities and provides them with an incentive to protect their environmental resources. Moreover, it provides a better opportunity to involve the main stakeholders in policymaking.
Frederick Burkle, senior public policy scholar at the Wilson Center and a senior fellow of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative at the Harvard School of Public Health, recently cited the military’s failure to restore services, specifically public health services in Iraq, as something the State Department and USAID should seize on to justify the end of “militarized aid.” He pointed out that a 2004 joint report by the Iraqi Ministry of Health and Red Cross found more death and illness was due to the country’s decimated public health infrastructure and social protections than to the violence of war:These indirect deaths from war are preventable but require attention from the occupying powers to the invaded country’s declining public health, social, and physical protections. Iraqis were well aware of this deficiency, and the United States’ lack of attention to the matter led to the loss of lasting trust.
For more on Iraq, be sure to also check out The New Security Beat’s interview with Steve Lonergan, former head of Canada-Iraq Marshlands Initiative, on the state of the southern marshes and their potential for peacemaking.
Sources: Foreign Affairs, The New York Times.
Photo Credit: Adapted from “Tangle of electrical wires in Baghdad,” courtesy of flickr user News Hour (PBS News Hour – Larisa Epatko).
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)
