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ID: 184058

Drought, Local Public Goods, and Inter-communal Conflicts: Testing the Mediating Effects of Public Service Provisions / Cao, Xun

Cao, Xun	Journal Article
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Summary/Abstract

Water charities and the UN development goals consider access to clean water and sanitation as transformative: improving personal dignity, quality of life and economic opportunities for individuals and the economic resilience of communities to climate stress. Can the provision of services also mitigate the conflict potential arising from climate change? If so, how broad must access be to become effective? We test how household access to improved water, sanitation, and electricity affects the probability of local conflict in nine drought-prone African countries. We use annual PRIO-GRID cells as the unit of analysis and model the probability of a grid-cell experiencing fatal armed conflict during local or proximate drought conditions. DHS data are used to calculate the percentage of households with access to specific services. We show that even relatively modest investments in reliable sanitation and water infrastructures enhance communities’ ability to avoid getting drawn into violent conflict in response to rainfall shocks.

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Conflicts ; Climate Change ; Drought ; Local Public Goods

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ID: 155937

Tax reform, fiscal decentralisation and local public goods provision in China / Fang, Wang ; Shuo, Chen

Wang Fang, Chen Shuo	Journal Article
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Using a provincial panel data set taking advantage of the time variations brought about by the 1994 fiscal reform, this study provides empirical evidence to the hypothesis that the level of public service improves when local governments enjoy a certain degree of fiscal autonomy. China is the ideal region for this identification strategy since it has experienced various changes in the central–local fiscal relationships during its economic transition. Besides the ordinary least squares estimation, the instrumental variables approach is also applied to address the problems of measurement error in fiscal decentralisation indexes. This research lends empirical support to the literature, which argues that decentralisation improves the delivery of public services.

Key Words

China ; Tax Reform ; Fiscal Decentralisation ; Local Public Goods

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