Final Report Summary - STATECAP (State Capacity, Development, Conflict, and Climate Change)
This project has dealt with two sets of issues.
The first set of issues has concerned the role of state building in the development process, and the role played by violent conflict – whether internal or external to the state. In this research, we have built a sequence of models, from the stepping stone of a basic framework where new infrastructure expanding the state’s capacity to raise revenue and to support private markets is determined by investments under uncertainty. The extensions have included adding violence in the form of repression as well as civil war. The objective of the modeling has been to understand the development clusters we observe in the data: some countries are poor and violence-stricken with poorly working institutions, while others are rich, resolve their conflicts peacefully and have institutions and policies in good order. The better understanding of the complex interactions between institutions violence and income will help us in the design of development assistance, by showing that different forms of assistance can have different consequences in the same state and that the same form of development assistance can have different consequences in different states. Another overall achievement has been to help bring the analysis of state capacity into the mainstream of economics.
The second set of issues has concerned the economics of climate change. The major effort has been to estimate the historical effects of weather on infant mortality in Africa, using a variety of data sources: individual data from retrospective DHS surveys, finely-gridded weather data from so-called re-analysis with large-scale climate models, and spatial data on harvest times from satellite data on plant growth. Exploiting the random component of historical weather fluctuation has allowed us to estimate causal effects on health outcomes via malnutrition and malaria. This research can be seen as a pilot study, to develop a methodology for studying the weather impacts on any outcome of interest anywhere in the world. Eventually, such estimates can be used to gauge the future costs of climate change.
The first set of issues has concerned the role of state building in the development process, and the role played by violent conflict – whether internal or external to the state. In this research, we have built a sequence of models, from the stepping stone of a basic framework where new infrastructure expanding the state’s capacity to raise revenue and to support private markets is determined by investments under uncertainty. The extensions have included adding violence in the form of repression as well as civil war. The objective of the modeling has been to understand the development clusters we observe in the data: some countries are poor and violence-stricken with poorly working institutions, while others are rich, resolve their conflicts peacefully and have institutions and policies in good order. The better understanding of the complex interactions between institutions violence and income will help us in the design of development assistance, by showing that different forms of assistance can have different consequences in the same state and that the same form of development assistance can have different consequences in different states. Another overall achievement has been to help bring the analysis of state capacity into the mainstream of economics.
The second set of issues has concerned the economics of climate change. The major effort has been to estimate the historical effects of weather on infant mortality in Africa, using a variety of data sources: individual data from retrospective DHS surveys, finely-gridded weather data from so-called re-analysis with large-scale climate models, and spatial data on harvest times from satellite data on plant growth. Exploiting the random component of historical weather fluctuation has allowed us to estimate causal effects on health outcomes via malnutrition and malaria. This research can be seen as a pilot study, to develop a methodology for studying the weather impacts on any outcome of interest anywhere in the world. Eventually, such estimates can be used to gauge the future costs of climate change.