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Date: April 29, 2024 Mon
Time: 9:24 pm
Time: 9:24 pm
Results for economic conditions and violence
1 results foundAuthor: Cramer, Christopher Title: Unemployment and Participation in Violence Summary: How are unemployment and violence linked? Ideas about this link are driven by an OECD literature on crime, gangs and unemployment and by recent economic models of developing country ‘civil wars’. These ideas are commonly linked with an increasing interest in the age-structure of demography in developing countries, in particular the observation of a common ‘youth bulge’. There is a very widespread view that youth unemployment is a key cause of insurgency or civil war. This is despite the fact that there is barely any reliable evidence on youth unemployment for any developing country. Running through many assumptions about the role of labour markets, and in particular unemployment, in causing violence and violent conflict, is the influence of the “economic approach” championed by Gary Becker with respect to crime and punishment initially and then by others including Jack Hirshleifer. This paper first sets out the main features of the economic approach to the study of violence in developing countries, as a special class of economic approaches to an increasingly wide circle of social phenomena. The paper then shows that there are other analytical approaches to studying labour market participation and its links to violent behaviour – in wars and in other forms of violence, including domestic violence. From a range of analytical sources, it becomes clear that there is a rich body of work on the reasons why there may be a variety of relationships between employment, unemployment, and violence. This paper argues that it is not wise simply to read off violent outcomes from given degrees of demographic bulge or, indeed, from given labour market figures and argues that there are no grounds empirically for the commonly made claims that there is a strong, automatic causal connection from unemployment, underemployment, or low productivity employment to violence and war. The implications are: that there are other grounds for acting to protect the lives and improve the prospects of those very large numbers of people vulnerable to appalling working conditions, to un- and under-employment, to poor health and premature death, to violence, and to extreme poverty; that specific variables, such as unemployment, typically have rather complex implications for violent outcomes; and that labour market and economic policy, if they are to be a part of efforts to reduce violence, cannot be reduced to policies designed simply to maximise the number of work opportunities available at however competitive or apparently market clearing a wage rate. Above all, perhaps, the implication of the work reviewed in this paper is that we still know too little empirically, let alone theoretically, about the relationships between labour market participation, institutions and relations and violence. In particular, the rapid growth of interest among development economists in the past twenty years or so in violent conflict and its aftermath in developing countries has made many advances but has devoted very little attention to labour markets. Details: Washington, DC: World Bank, 2010. 36p. Source: Internet Resource: World Development Report 2011 Background Paper: Accessed November 19, 2011 at: http://wdr2011.worldbank.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/WDR%20Background%20Paper%20-%20Cramer.pdf?keepThis=true&TB_iframe=true&height=600&width=800 Year: 2010 Country: International URL: http://wdr2011.worldbank.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/WDR%20Background%20Paper%20-%20Cramer.pdf?keepThis=true&TB_iframe=true&height=600&width=800 Shelf Number: 123413 Keywords: Economic Conditions and ViolenceEconomics and CrimeUnemployment and Crime |