Unanticipated spikes in food prices can increase malnutrition among the poor, with lasting consequences; however, livelihood strategies that include producing food for home consumption are expected to offer a measure of protection. Using anthropometric and consumption data from Indonesia...

There is widespread interest in the number of hungry people in the world and trends in hunger. Current global counts rely on combining each country's total food balance with information on distribution patterns from household consumption expenditure surveys. Recent research has advocated for...

This paper reviews the prospects for long-term food security in Asia, where a significant number of malnourished individuals still live after decades of mixed progress. Evidence shows that poverty reduction on its own will not do the job of eradicating hunger, nor will only increased food...

In conflict-prone situations, access to markets is necessary to restore economic growth and generate the preconditions for peace and reconstruction. Hence, the rehabilitation of damaged transport infrastructure has emerged as an overarching investment priority among donors and governments. This...

The author provides empirical evidence on the effects of inflation on post-war capital flight flows. He tests the hypothesis that inflation has a positive additional impact on capital flight flows after war. He uses a new panel dataset of 77 developing countries, of which 35 experienced at least...

Countries emerging from civil war attract both aid and policy advice. This paper provides the first systematic empirical analysis of aid and policy reform in the post-conflict growth process. It is based on a comprehensive data set of large civil wars and covers 27 countries that were in their...

This paper assesses the impact of the demobilization, reinsertion and reintegration program in post-war Burundi. Two major rebel groups benefited from cash and in-kind transfers, the CNDD-FDD from 2004, and the FNL from 2010. A panel data of households collected in 2006 and 2010 is combined with...

Iraq was plunged into two simultaneous crises in the second half of 2014, one driven by a sharp decline in oil prices, the other, by the war against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. The severity and recurrent nature of these crises demand a fast understanding and quantification of their...

This paper argues that state weakness is broader than implied previously in the civil war literature, and that particular types of weakness in interaction with natural resources have aggravating or mitigating consequences for the risk of civil war. While in anocracies or unstable regimes natural...

This paper uses a global computable general-equilibrium framework with new detail on six Levant countries -- the Arab Republic of Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, the Syrian Arab Republic, and Turkey -- to quantify the direct and indirect economic effects of the Syrian war and the advance of the...