Objective
Violent conflict has been identified as one of the most important constraints to poverty reduction and the promotion of economic development and democracy worldwide, especially in areas characterized by persistent violence and fragile institutions.
The main objective of this project is to ascertain how the presence of armed conflict affects the capacity of households to cope with income shocks and uncertainty. It will investigate the relationship between vulnerability to poverty, violent conflict and household welfare in the context of the Maoist insurrection in India.
The project will use data from the Young Lives project in Andhra Pradesh, the National Sample Survey, and new event data on the Maoist conflict. It first examines which types of idiosyncratic and covariate shocks affect household welfare, and how households respond to these. It will then explicitly incorporate Maoist violence in the analysis, and studies the impact of the movement on households’ ability to insure against and cope with adverse shocks identified in the first step. Finally, the distributive effect of the Maoist movement in Andhra Pradesh will be studied. This will yield important information about the dynamics of the conflict.
The project represents one of the first micro-empirical attempts to link two important strands in recent development economics research: research on the relationship between economic shocks and household welfare, and research on the welfare consequences of conflict and violence. This knowledge is crucial for the design and implementation of safety nets and insurance schemes, as well as leading to important lessons on how to deal with conflict impacts at the household level. It will contribute to the state of the art of modern development economics by investigating the impact of persistent, low-level conflict. It will also advance substantially our knowledge of the mechanisms of insurgencies founded on ideological aims.
Fields of science
Topic(s)
Call for proposal
FP7-PEOPLE-2011-IEF
See other projects for this call
Funding Scheme
MC-IEF - Intra-European Fellowships (IEF)Coordinator
BN1 9RE Brighton - Falmer
United Kingdom