Leaders’ Foreign Travel and Democracy

This paper investigates whether the number of trips by a country's leader to the United States allows the country to adopt a more democratic system of governance and to embrace better democratic practices. To achieve its objective, the paper uses a novel variable that indicates the number of trips by a leader or a head of a government to the United States of America from 1960-2015. The baseline results show that the number of leaders’ trips to the United States has a statistically significant positive coefficient, which provides evidence that these foreign trips are positively associated with democratic governance. These results are robust even after the inclusion of several control variables identified by the literature as confounding factors of democracy, and after controlling for outliers

Leaders’ Foreign Travel and Foreign Debt

This paper examines the effect of foreign travel by the leader or the head of state to the United States on the ability of the country to attract foreign loans. The key difficulty in determining a causal effect is the issue of endogeneity. As much as the leader’s trips abroad may attract foreign loans, it is also possible that leaders are tempted to visit countries known to be major creditors. To deal with potential endogeneity, we introduce a novel instrumental variable for the number of leader’s trips. The instrument is urban distance defined as the gap between the level of urban development in the country of the leader relative to that in the United States. We conduct a 2SLS where the urban distance serves as a source of exogenous variation in leader’s trips. The estimation provides evidence of a statistically significant positive coefficient of leader’s trips. This result implies that these trips by the leaders signal to the creditors their commitment to use the borrowed funds properly and to repay these funds in due time. Our results are robust even after the inclusion of other control variable, using alternative samples, and accounting for the potential of instrument weakness

Education, paludisme et moustiquaires imprégnées d'insecticide en Afrique sub-saharienne

This article explores the relationship between the cover of insecticide-treated mosquito net and some indicators of education. The analysis is based on a panel sample of 41 countries of sub-Saharan African over the period 2001-2006. Our results suggest that cover of insecticide-treated mosquito net positivelyaffect the indicators of education. Cet articles’intéresse à la relation entre la couverture en moustiquaires imprégnées d’insecticide et quelquesindicateurs d’éducation. L’étude est réalisée en panel à partir d’un échantillon de 41 pays d’Afrique sub-saharienne sur la période de 2001 à 2006. Nos résultats suggèrent qu’en général l’augmentation de la couverture en moustiquaire affecte positivement les indicateurs d’éducation considérés

VIH/Aids and alcohol: re-examination of the relation from african data

This article re-examines the relationship alcohol and VIH/Aids, while resorting to another methodological approach that utilized by Fisher et al., (2007) and Kalichman et al. (2007). We confirm a direct relation of alcohol to the AIDS

Leaders’ Foreign Travel and Foreign Investment Inflows

This paper examines the effect of foreign travel by the leader or the head of state on the ability of the country to attract foreign capital, as reflected by foreign direct investment inflows. The key difficulty in determining a causal effect is the issue of endogeneity. As much as the leader’s trips abroad may attract foreign capital inflows, it is also possible that leaders are tempted to visit countries known to have a high level of investment out of their borders. To deal with potential endogeneity, we introduce a novel instrumental variable. The instrument used is urban distance which is defined as the gap between the level of urban development in the country of the leader relative to that of the United States. The 2SLS shows that the leader’s trips variable, instrumented by urban distance, has a statistically significant negative coefficient. This is the case even after the inclusion of other control variables and after using alternative samples. This result implies that these costly trips by the leaders can crowd out spending on the infrastructure needed for foreign investment, and can signal lack of seriousness by the leaders in spending on the implementation of reforms needed to attract foreign capital

Leaders’ Foreign Travel and Foreign Debt

This paper examines the effect of foreign travel by the leader or the head of state to the United States on the ability of the country to attract foreign loans. The key difficulty in determining a causal effect is the issue of endogeneity. As much as the leader’s trips abroad may attract foreign loans, it is also possible that leaders are tempted to visit countries known to be major creditors. To deal with potential endogeneity, we introduce a novel instrumental variable for the number of leader’s trips. The instrument is urban distance defined as the gap between the level of urban development in the country of the leader relative to that in the United States. We conduct a 2SLS where the urban distance serves as a source of exogenous variation in leader’s trips. The estimation provides evidence of a statistically significant positive coefficient of leader’s trips. This result implies that these trips by the leaders signal to the creditors their commitment to use the borrowed funds properly and to repay these funds in due time. Our results are robust even after the inclusion of other control variable, using alternative samples, and accounting for the potential of instrument weakness

The Effect of U.S. Officials’ Visits on Conflict

This paper examines the effect of the number of visits by U.S. Presidents and Secretaries of State to the country on civil conflict. To achieve our objective, we compile novel variables that indicate the number of official visits from 1960-2017 derived from the historical archives of the U.S. State Department. To deal with potential endogeneity, we introduce novel instrumental variables for the number of official visits variables, namely aviation safety and capital distance. The 2SLS estimations provide evidence that the visits by U.S. officials to the country have a statistically significant positive effect on the onset of conflict. This indicates that the visits by U.S. officials induce the insurgents to engage in armed conflict with the incumbent government that is perceived as a stooge of the United States

Leaders’ Foreign Travel and Democracy

This paper investigates whether the number of trips by a country's leader to the United States allows the country to adopt a more democratic system of governance and to embrace better democratic practices. To achieve its objective, the paper uses a novel variable that indicates the number of trips by a leader or a head of a government to the United States of America from 1960-2015. The baseline results show that the number of leaders’ trips to the United States has a statistically significant positive coefficient, which provides evidence that these foreign trips are positively associated with democratic governance. These results are robust even after the inclusion of several control variables identified by the literature as confounding factors of democracy, and after controlling for outliers

Poor Numbers: explanation of Africa's statistical tragedy

Why does sub-Saharan Africa have statistics of low quality? We try to provide an answer by empirically testing a plethora of hypotheses. Results show that with the exception of English, French and Portuguese colonies, other colonies have a weak statistical capacity. Ethnic fragmentation, openness and revolutions lead to the same conclusion. Government effectiveness positively associated statistical capacity. The level of development has a nonlinear relationship with statistical capacity, while the effect of human capital remains complex. Pourquoi l’Afrique sub-saharienne a des statistiques de faible qualité ? Nous testons à partir d’un échantillon africain plusieurs hypothèses explicatives, de manière empirique. Les résultats suggèrent que les colonies autres qu’anglaises, portugaises et françaises ont des faibles capacités statistiques. La fragmentation ethnique, l’ouverture et les révolutions conduisent aussi à la même conclusion. L’efficacité du gouvernement est positivement liée à la capacité statistique. Le niveau de développement est associé de manière non linéaire à la capacité statistique. L’effet du capital humain reste complexe

Do Nations Combine O-Rings with Cobb-Douglas? Evidence from agriculture, equipment production, and the informal sector

The article focuses on the conditional relationship between various human capital proxies and the size of potential “O-Ring” or “Cobb-Douglas” sectors. We find that that years of schooling are a robust negative predictor of the size of the informal sector, conditioned on national average test scores, suggests that the signaling and acculturation mechanisms of schooling may help shift potentially productive workers into the formal economy