Social engineering refers to deliberate attempts, often under the form of legislative moves, to promote changes in customs and norms that hurt the interests of marginalized population groups. This paper explores the analytical conditions under which social engineering is more or less likely to...

Rapid economic development in China in the post-1978 era has been considered 'intriguing' and 'puzzling' since it occurred under the dominance of the Chinese Communist Party - the fusion of politics and economics is supposed to be a powerful impediment to market growth. Scholars have proposed...

This paper aims to contribute to understanding the existing knowledge gaps in the linkages of energy, water, and land use in Southeast Asia and explores the political economy of energy transition in the Mekong region (MR). Investigating the struggle over hydropower development and...

A number of studies document an in-group bias in social dilemma situations. While group structure and dynamics are important in shaping in-group favouritism, less attention has been paid to individual characteristics affecting favouritism. Using data from dictator games conducted among 523...

The Mekong River is the major water source in Southeast Asia and shared by six countries. There is a rush to acquire sources of alternative energy and other benefits to meet the growing demand for water and energy, while China and Myanmar have refused to cooperate fully in the Mekong River...

This paper presents a framed field experiment on ecological altruism in Mindoro, Philippines. Behavioural differences between ethnic groups in Mindoro-the Tagalogs and the Mangyans-were investigated. We designed a two-part donation task (i.e. dictator game) where the recipient of the donation...

We run a lab-in-the-field experiment with 1,060 university students in Mozambique to examine the correlates of behavioural dishonesty, distinguishing between intrinsic and extrinsic factors. Using an incentivized dice game, which yields direct estimates of the propensity to cheat, we find that...

Macroeconomic instability has been increasingly considered as a factor lowering average income growth and, in this way, is a factor slowing down poverty reduction. But it can also result in slower poverty reduction for a given average rate of growth, due to poverty traps, often examined at the...