War and infant mortality rates

War represents one of the gravest threats to the right to health. A range of international human rights covenants have enumerated the rights of both adults and children to lead full healthy lives, free from the dangers of war. Yet we know remarkably little about how war systematically affects children’s rights to health. We have limited knowledge about if different types of conflict—major interstate and major civil wars—have similar or different consequences for children’s health. This article examines the immediate and cumulative links of major interstate and major civil wars with infant mortality rates, a key measure of children’s health. The article employs generalized least squares regression with two-way fixed effects over the 1950–2007 period. The core results indicate that major civil and major interstate wars substantively violate children’s and infants’ rights to health. States that spent the most amount of time involved in major interstate wars were associated with the worst overall increases in infant mortality rates

IMF Lending: Partisanship, Punishment, and Protest

This Element argues that governments allocate adjustment burdens strategically to protect their supporters, imposing adjustment costs upon the supporters of their opponents, who then protest in response. Using large-N micro-level survey data from three world regions and a global survey, it discusses the local political economy of International Monetary Fund (IMF) lending. It finds that opposition supporters in countries under IMF structural adjustment programs (SAP) are more likely to report that the IMF SAP increased economic hardships than government supporters and countries without IMF exposure. In addition, it finds that partisan gaps in IMF SAP evaluations widen in IMF program countries with an above-median number of conditions, suggesting that opposition supporters face heavier adjustment burdens, and that opposition supporters who think SAPs made their lives worse are more likely to protest

A new dataset on infant mortality rates, 1816-2002

Systematic data on annual infant mortality rates are of use to a variety of social science research programs in demography, economics, sociology, and political science. Infant mortality rates may be used both as a proxy measure for economic development, in lieu of energy consumption or GDP-per-capita measures, and as an indicator of the extent to which governments provide for the economic and social welfare of their citizens. Until recently, data were available for only a limited number of countries based on regional or country-level studies and time periods for years after 1950. Here, the authors introduce a new dataset reporting annual infant mortality rates for all states in the world, based on the Correlates of War state system list, between 1816 and 2002. They discuss past research programs using infant mortality rates in conflict studies and describe the dataset by exploring its geographic and temporal coverage. Next, they explain some of the limitations of the dataset as well as issues associated with the data themselves. Finally, they suggest some research areas that might benefit from the use of this dataset. This new dataset is the most comprehensive source on infant mortality rates currently available to social science researchers

Economic Development and the World Bank

We contribute to the research stream examining the effects of World Bank lending programs on economic growth in developing economies. We contend that it is important to distinguish between the short-term effects and extended exposure of countries to these lending programs and also to assess the Bank’s (late 1990s) reforms to improve the effectiveness of these programs in recipient countries to assess whether program lending has any positive impacts on economic growth. Our comparative cross-national findings using instrumental variables analysis to control for endogeneity between program participation and economic growth demonstrate that both the short-term and longer exposure to program lending worsens economic growth. We find no evidence that World Bank reforms improved economic growth rates in the post-reform (1999−2009) period. Our findings are robust to changes in model specifications and estimation techniques. Future research should examine whether these reforms had beneficial impacts in other societal areas affected by program lending

Partisanship, protection, and punishment: how governments affect the distributional consequences of International Monetary Fund programs

No abstract available

Replication data for: “The International Human Rights Regime and the Strategic Shift to Forced Disappearance.”

Replication Material