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Category: Politics

Published December 8, 2011

“Vous êtes pas tannés de mourir, bande de caves?”*

When I started blogging at the end of 2010, I swore never to discuss Québec politics in this space, first and foremost because my expertise lies in development policy, but also because my opinions about Québec politics, society, and culture are not shared by many.

I thus thought I would spare myself being called a sellout — not only do I live and work in the US, I also write in English, two things that are often viewed with suspicion in Québec — and keep my political opinions to myself.

Earlier this week, however, Jérôme Lussier wrote a column titled “Doléances pour un Québec dépassé” (“Complaints for an outdated Québec”) in Voir, a Montreal-based independent weekly, and every single thing he wrote deserves to be said, repeated, and broadcast far and wide. Lussier’s column is a deeply humanistic cri du coeur.

Because it’s the holidays, I am in a giving mood. So here is my bit of agitprop for the year: my translation of Lussier’s column. Bear in mind that the following is the intellectual property of Lussier.

Continue reading“Vous êtes pas tannés de mourir, bande de caves?”*
Published November 29, 2011

My Work on Food Prices Discussed in Sweden’s Axess Magasin

A study by Marc F. Bellemare (2011) studies the link between food prices and food-related protests and riots. The study uses the amount of news about food riots as a measure of how widespread protests are and relates these to monthly data on food prices. This creates a relatively short time periods (months rather than years), which increases the accuracy of the relationship. Indeed, if one studies the relationship betweenthe protests in the Middle East that began in January and February with annual data, one would have missed the fact that that they were preceded by very large price increases starting in the fall of 2010. To identify a causal relationship, the study uses natural disasters to explain variation in food prices. Interestingly, the results of this study show that rising food prices lead to increased risk of protests, but that the effect is reverse for food price volatility.

This is from an article in in Sweden’s Axess Magasin by Jesper Roine, of the Stockholm School of Economics.

The original article is in Swedish — the above excerpt is brought to you in part by Google Translate. From the Wiki page for Axess Magasin, I conclude that it’s Sweden’s equivalent of The Atlantic.

Published November 29, 2011

The Long-Run Effects of the Scramble for Africa

That’s the title of a new working paper by Stelious Michalopoulos and Elias Papaioannou:

We examine the long-run consequences of the scramble for Africa among European powers in the late 19th century and uncover the following empirical regularities. First, using information on the spatial distribution of African ethnicities before colonization, we show that borders were arbitrarily drawn. Apart from the land mass and water area of an ethnicity’s historical homeland, no other geographic, ecological, historical, and ethnic-specific traits predict which ethnic groups have been partitioned by the national border. Second, using data on the location of civil conflicts after independence, we show that partitioned ethnic groups have suffered significantly more warfare; moreover, partitioned ethnicities have experienced more prolonged and more devastating civil wars. Third, we identify sizeable spillovers; civil conflict spreads from the homeland of partitioned ethnicities to nearby ethnic regions. These results are robust to a rich set of controls at a fine level and the inclusion of country fixed effects and ethnic-family fixed effects. The uncovered evidence thus identifies a sizable causal impact of the scramble for Africa on warfare.