The Ebola pandemic as a threat to international peace and security: a question of collective security or global governance?

Społeczność międzynarodowa stoi w obliczu rozproszonego i ponadnarodowego zagrożenia epidemiologicznego, którego powaga i rozmiar wymagają obecnie niespotykanego poziomu interwencji. Na przestrzeni wieków ludzkość zmagała się z różnymi epidemia, co zawsze wiązało się z koniecznością kompleksowego działania na płaszczyźnie międzynarodowej. Zdaniem Rady Bezpieczeństwa ONZ epidemia spowodowana wirusem ebola, która wybuchła pod koniec 2013 r., stanowi szczególne zagrożenie dla pokoju i bezpieczeństwa międzynarodowego, ponieważ zdobycze w obszarze budowania pokoju i rozwoju krajów najbardziej dotkniętych epidemią mogą zostać zaprzepaszczone. To z kolei podważa stabilność krajów najbardziej nią dotkniętych. Jeśli nie zostanie opanowana, to sytuacja taka może doprowadzić do wybuchu nowych niepokojów i napięć społecznych, pogorszenia klimatu politycznego, stygmatyzacji i wzmocnienia poczucia niepewności. Podjęta w tej sprawie przez Radę Bezpieczeństwa ONZ rezolucja ma wymiar historyczny, gdyż po raz pierwszy problem zdrowia publicznego został zaklasyfikowany jako zagrożenie dla pokoju i bezpieczeństwa międzynarodowego. Stało się tak, mimo że mobilizacja międzynarodowa była spóźniona o kilka miesięcy, chociaż konieczność podjęcia działań była wówczas oczywista.The international community faces a fragmented and transnational epidemiological threat, the severity and extent of which currently require an unprecedented level of intervention. Over the centuries, mankind has been confronted with a variety of epidemics that have always required a comprehensive action at the international level. According to the UN Security Council, the outbreak of the Ebola virus at the end of 2013 poses a particular threat to international peace and security, as the peace-building and development achievements of the countries most affected by the epidemic are jeopardised and may end in vain or be lost altogether. This in turn undermines the stability of the countries most affected. If the disease is not brought under control, this situation might lead to a new unrest and social tensions, and worsening of the political climate, or stigmatisation and a higher sense of uncertainty in the region. The resolution adopted by the UN Security Council on this matter has a historic dimension, as it has for the first time classified a public health problem as a threat to international peace and security. This happened despite the fact that international mobilisation had been delayed by several months, despite the obvious urgent need for action

The Effects of Drought on Crop Yields and Yield Variability in Sahel

Drought is widespread in Sahel, and its persistent occurrence has caused substantial damages to the agricultural sector. The severity of drought and the related damages to the agricultural sector are expected to increase due to global warming. In this paper, I examine the economic impacts of drought on Sahel agriculture. The maximum likelihood estimators of the Just-Pope stochastic production function indicate that the direction of the effects of climate variables is similar across crops, but their magnitudes differ. Specifically, drought as measured by a 6-month standardized precipitation index, poor rainfall spread, and degree-days have adverse effects on crop yields. The results are robust to alternative estimation methods.crop yields, drought, stochastic production model, Sahel, Crop Production/Industries, Environmental Economics and Policy, International Development, O13, O55, Q54,

Selection of weak VARMA models by Akaïke's information criteria

This article considers the problem of orders selections of vector autoregressive moving-average (VARMA) models and the sub-class of vector autoregressive (VAR) models under the assumption that the errors are uncorrelated but not necessarily independent. We relax the standard independence assumption to extend the range of application of the VARMA models, and allow to cover linear representations of general nonlinear processes. We propose a modified criterion to the corrected AIC (Akaïke information criterion) version (AICc) introduced by Tsai and Hurvich (1989). This modified criterion is an approximately unbiased estimator of the Kullback-Leibler discrepancy, originally used to derive AIC-based criteria. Moreover, this criterion requires the estimation of the matrice involved in the asymptotic variance of the quasi-maximum likelihood (QML) estimator of the models, which provide an additional information about models. Monte carlo experiments show that the proposed modified criterion estimates the models orders more accurately than the standard AIC and AICc in large samples and often in small samples.AIC, discrepancy, Kullback-Leibler information, QMLE/LSE, order selection, structural representation, weak VARMA models.

Conflict, Growth, and Poverty in Guinea-Bissau

Conflicts and political instability have been serious constraints to growth in Guinea-Bissau. Of special concern was the civil war of 1998, which lasted 11 months and led to substantial loss of life as well as to a massive decrease in GDP per capita. Based on research on the economic cost of conflicts in Sub-Saharan Africa conducted by Lopez and Wodon (2005) and using a technique to identify outliers in time series and to correct the series for such outliers, this chapter estimates that GDP per capita today could have been more than 40 percent higher if there had been no conflict in 1998. In turn, one in three persons living in poverty today might not be poor had it not been for the conflict.Poverty; conflict; growth; Guinea-Bissau