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Thank you very much. I'm probably one of the few economists here, and you might ask yourself quite rightly,
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what economists have got to contribute to the whole topic of war and peace.
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So let me tell you, T.J., a little bit about what Paul and I have been doing for the last 10 years.
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So, first of all, we started by studying war, not peace.
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So what type of war? If you sort of look at how many wars there are, so this is just simply the number of wars.
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And then this is the end of the Second World War. And this is sort of more or less up to today.
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The Upsala prio dataset gives you the numbers.
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And this very light coloured one colonial war.
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So obviously they've sort of run out of from fashion because they know colonies any longer.
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And then they're international wars are the dark ones. They're very, very few of those.
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And the overwhelming majority of large scale violent conflict.
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So we're looking at conflicts that cause a thousand battle related deaths a year.
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These are military and civilian deaths. So civil war is the most common form of large scale violent conflict.
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So if you're looking only at those civil wars, again, I'm just looking at the numbers here.
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And then they were quite a few at the after the Second World War.
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And then it's sort of built up and reached peak in 92.
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And since the end of the Cold War, basically the world has become a safer place in terms of large scale, violent internal conflict.
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And for those of you who are in particularly interested in Africa, it's sort of Miro's very much the sort of global development.
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So, yes, the chance of the universities. Right. The world is now safer then than it previously was.
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So is an economist. I can sort of give you those sort of numbers and data handling sort of what I do day in, day out.
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So my research always centres on civil war. And we're looking at what causes the civil war.
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Why do civil wars break out once they've broken out?
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What is their duration and then what happens? War.
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So let me just sit and talk you through those. There's a diff different issues.
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So I'd start with the onset of civil war.
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And Paul and I have come up with a model of civil war which aims to sort of estimate which factors make a country more prone to civil war than others.
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And the method we are using is a global panel study.
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So let me be quite clear about this, because this is important to me that you understand how we work.
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So we basically borrow a method from medical science.
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So, for example, you can study what determines what makes a person prone to having a heart attack.
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So you can score people. You can sort of say heart attack, yes or no.
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And then you can sort of see does this person look at does this person smoke?
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What's the exercise regime? What's their cholesterol?
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And then you can sort of calculate which factors are most important at determining the risk of a heart attack.
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And this is exactly the same what we did with countries. So we've got all countries and we sort of look at did a war break heart, yes or no?
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And then what sort of characteristics does this does this country have said this was them?
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It's really a string of papers, but in particular this greed and grievance in civil war paper.
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So these explanations of civil war onset. So what sort of characteristics might make a country more conflict prone?
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We were sort of agnostic. We looked at economics as as one way of explaining it, because for us,
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the key in organising and maintaining large scale violent conflict is that you have to recruit and maintain a private army.
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And you need money for this and finances. So we sort of thought it must have something to do with economics.
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But we also look at political science. Explanations to democratic countries have less of a proneness, choose large scale bomb conflict sociology.
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So the difference between people in terms of religion or.
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Message to your class. Does that make a difference in the probability of experiencing a war history if you've already had a civil war,
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does that make you more conflict prone geography if you're more mountainous?
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If you a country's population is dispersed in a particular way, maybe more concentrated or more dispersed.
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Does that matter? So we do which predictive Gnostic and such are looking at what makes a country more conflict prone?
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If I give you a few conclusions from this onset model, we find very little evidence that the things that we can measure as grievances.
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So diversity in society, but that matters of religious or ethnic diversity matters.
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Income inequality also does not matter to does not make a country more conflict prone on average.
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Yeah, I'm stressing on average because we all know Uncle Joe, who should have turned 90 and smoked three packs a day and didn't have a heart attack.
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So there can always be a case, you know, where this is different.
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But this is on average economic factors are very important, sets the level, the growth and the structure of income that we found to be important.
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So first of all, the poorer you are, the more likely you are to have a civil war.
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So poverty really matters. And so that's the level of income.
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And if you've experienced a recent growth decline, then you're also more likely to have civil war.
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And these might have something to do with what we call opportunity costs.
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So you've got nothing to lose. You know, you might as well join a rebel army because there's very little other employment, formal employment possible.
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And you can sort of gain from taking part in this in this in this civil war.
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It might also give you access to education and might give you access to medical help.
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There are all sorts of different reasons why people might want to join a civil war movement.
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So the structure of income, what I mean here is sort of in particular,
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we found that if your country is rich in natural resources, then you're very conflict prone.
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So one example, of course, are the blood diamonds in Sierra Leone and Angola.
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But there are other examples of timber in Liberia.
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And think of the drugs in Afghanistan and Colombia,
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which have been financing those those wars fought for a long time and said these are very important.
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So these sort of sources of income are very important. Well, we also found was that if you have a large diaspora community,
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your wars have more conflict prone because these diaspora communities, for example, the Tamils.
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But also the Kurds. I mean, a lot of diaspora populations basically tax their population and send the money back home.
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And the hard currency actually can buy you a lot of weapons.
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And in particular, the case of the Tamil Tigers. That's very well documented. And this is very intuitive.
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The past conflict makes the country more conflict prone.
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So these are the cycles of violence that we heard and heard about just now.
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The good news is if you can maintain the peace for longer, the risk of a new civil war breaking out declines.
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So if you can manage to sort of stabilise the peace for longer and longer, longer, the better are the chances that it will continue to.
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That the country will remain peaceful. So this was more on the on the onset of of civil war.
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But what determines once the war is broken out, how long it lasts?
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So, first of all,
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we found that all these sort of factors that I've just gone through are not very important in determining the length of the civil war.
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In fact, there are very few variables that we could really nail down a sort of at explaining the duration of civil war.
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One thing that was quite important was natural resource prices. So if they, for example, go up, then the war continues for a bit longer.
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Statistically speaking, that's all I wanted to say about the duration of war for the for the moment because.
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I do not only study war, but I do want to study peace as well.
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So from my point of view, there are two main post-conflict challenges.
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One is the economic recovery. And one is the risk reduction of risk reduction in the sense of really peace building.
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How do you maintain the peace? So I'm first, can you talk about the economic recovery?
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And then I'm going to talk about the reduction of risk.
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And of course, this this is the development and this the security.
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And one cannot happen without the other.
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So Kofi Annan's sort of no security, without development, no development, without security is certainly right.
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But the instruments with which we obtain one or the other might not be the same.
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But these two are interdependent. Said the economic recovery.
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We first of all ask ourselves, is there a peace dividend after all, these countries are not spending all this much on killing each other any longer.
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And if there is such a spontaneous recovery process, is there teep peace dividend?
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And can the outside world help? Does aid increase the growth post-conflict?
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And does policy improve growth post-conflict?
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So if you're making reforms, these sort of windows of opportunity,
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some was talking about these sort of drivers of of of change in a post-conflict world.
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Do they actually help growth? And we were able to do an empirical analysis of post-conflict societies.
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There are not many studies of this ilk about. And as Simon already alluded to it,
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you are only really able to study this since the end of the Cold War because
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it was just too overlaid with all sorts of ideological problems previously.
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So I'm always facing a data problem in the sense that I can only look at relatively few post-conflict societies.
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I do find for the ones that I can study that there is about one per cent extra growth per year.
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And the good news is that you can, with aid, increase this extra growth.
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Interestingly, the timing is important here. It happens three to seven years after the end of the conflict.
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That aid can increase growth. But traditionally, this is not what donors have done.
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Just think what donors typically do, that the conflict stops.
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And there's been some sort of negotiated settlement and they all try come in with a lot of money.
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But the economy is really, really on its knees.
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So the absorptive capacity is just simply not there to sort of really use this aid in a growth enhancing away.
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Traditionally, those have also gone out really quickly.
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So it's sort of like they've ever won this country with a lot of aid and then the next disaster happens and they go into the next problem country.
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So our message has been quite clear. Go in slowly, build it up slowly.
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There is a deep dividend that you can reap an increase.
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And if the peace is maintained for about 10 years, then this poor country is just like any other poor country.
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And you can treat it like that as an aid donor.
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But you're really in there for the long haul. We're not talking to use here.
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We're talking 10 years. And that's been quite, quite a potent suggestion to policymakers.
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And we sort of looked at we, again, were gnostic about it.
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What sort of policies are particularly important?
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Is it the type of monetary inflationary sort of policies that the post-conflict people from the IMF would advertise?
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Or is it structural policies?
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The World Bank knows you go after trick, get your trade right, or you end sort of saying you have to really work on social inclusion.
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And that little bit of data I have for this is sort of tends to indicate that the growth
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process post-conflict is particularly sensitive to improvements in social policies.
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Probably no surprise to an audience like this. So this has been on economic recovery.
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So it's really important to sort of because we know we reduce the risk of a new conflict breaking out when people have opportunities,
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when they have employment, when they have some sort of prosperity or at least hope that it will get better.
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One, when there is sort of growth in this sort of trickle through process. Okay.
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But can you actually sort of can we actually say something about the reduction
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of the risk through military expenditure that we just think for a minute?
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The the risk of having a renewed conflict is really high.
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You have about a 40 percent, 40 percent of all peace processes collapse within a decade.
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And so my question, one of my questions will be, can you actually reduce this risk by spending on the army?
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And important, I looked at this. And we actually find that if the country increases military spending and post-conflict,
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that it does exactly the opposite, it doesn't bring the rest down. So the idea I deter the rebel movement,
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either the old one or this or any new ones by sort of increasing my military expenditure, that simply doesn't work.
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It's also really tragic that a lot of post conflict governments do exactly that.
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They do increase their military expenditure.
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It's obvious to you that during the war, military expenditure goes up, but after the war's ended, it does not go back to the pre-war level.
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And these are extremely poor countries.
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We're talking about countries that have enormous needs in terms of health and education and infrastructure needs.
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So this is really sad and it does not deter new rebellions breaking out.
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So what about U.N. peacekeeping or coalitions of the willing?
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Do they actually help to prolong the peace? Said coalitions of the willing.
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I have got no data on. But what I can. Lockhart and what.
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What we didn't look at were U.N. peacekeeping operations.
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So at the moment that there is very little that there are very few studies cross country on peace building efforts.
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I'm sort of trying to think a little bit through what typically happens in post-conflict practise.
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And this is a sort of very rough sketch. And people who do this in more detail might be unhappy with this.
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But I sort of think there's some typically there's a negotiated settlement.
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About half of all conflicts end with a negotiated settlement.
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A quarter of one by the government outright and a quarter are one by rebels.
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So negotiated settlements is the sort of most typical.
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And two to two war. Then there is very often a light presence of peacekeeping troops and there's some effort of pump priming democracy.
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And the external actors maintain the light footprint.
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Then you have post-conflict elections and then you have democracy and you can withdraw everybody.
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So this is sort of my caricature of what seems to happen in a lot of post-conflict situations.
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So we started this statistically. So we had these 68 post-conflict episodes and as had 40 percent of all of these conflicts record with in the decade,
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says a really important issue to sort of get this get get this right.
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So what did we find from statistical results? So what prolongs the peace?
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First of all, there is really no safe period in the first decade.
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It's not that once you've had two years of peace, you're in a much safer place.
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Or once you've had four years of peace, you're a much safer place.
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You really. There's no such thing. You really have to sort of be in there for that for for the long haul.
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Keep in mind that the U.N. typically budgets for two years for for peacekeeping operations.
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So this is certainly not enough. So growth is very important.
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So a stagnant economy has a bout of a 42 percent risk of having another conflict.
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But if you manage 10 percent income growth might seem very high to you.
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But places like Uganda have come close to this.
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Then you really substantially reduce the risk of of having another conflict.
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So it's from goes from 40 to 27 percent. Elections, elections are always really featured is incredibly important.
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And unfortunately, I must say very often also as a departure date for peacekeeping troops to withdraw.
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So what do the elections do? The post-conflict risk? Nothing.
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Statistically speaking, nothing. Just before the election, the risk is slightly down.
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And after the elections, the risk is slightly up. But overall, there's no effect.
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I haven't got that many subsequent elections. But they don't seem to have a different effect either of the few that I have.
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Peacekeeping rarely works. If we double expenditure for for a post-conflict country, this risk of 40 percent is reduced to 31 percent.
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So let me just sort of come up with some sort of ideas on the post-conflict.
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General, general ideas about the post-conflict challenges. They are very fragile.
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We've heard that term from Simon already. But, you know, the statistics are very clear on this 40 percent or so high,
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a high proportion of post-conflict peace efforts that collapse democracy and elections are obviously intrinsically desirable,
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but they don't give you peace. So would you have come to the conclusion that you really need a package of military
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and economic assistance and you need this for a considerable period of time,
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10 years? This is this is what, you know, international agency judges should be looking at.
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Of course, our results are exclusively statistical.
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And you really have to apply this knowledge to the local situation.
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And I think this is very often being misunderstood. So, for example, we get military people who sort of come and sort of say to us,
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you've got these models where you can predict that the peace will break down or that a conflict breaks out.
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Countries sort of just give us an estimate of this in this country.
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And I'm always sort of aghast. You know, people want to use our model line.
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This, of course, I can crank the data through this, but it isn't a particularly useful way of.
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It's not an early warning system. And you know what? Through your foreign office and all your other sort of channels of information,
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you should be much better placed to sort of find out about these things than using a relatively
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crass and crude method of of of conflict prediction and the call you have for a model.
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So it's not very good about predicting the individuals countries risk.
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Yeah. For example, if you wanted to find about your heart attack risk,
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you don't go through this sort of big public health model because you know much more about that.
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It's much more detailed information. You know, you know, whether your brother has died of a heart attack, you know the family history.
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You'd know an awful lot more things than this sort of big mortal could sort of ever look at.
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But for public health prescriptions, the model,
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the heart attack model that I sort of laid out is very important because then you can sort of decide as a public policymaker,
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how much money do I want to earmark towards reducing smoking and other visibly other health initiatives?
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And this is exactly how I think people have to sort of see the statistical efforts that we're pursuing.
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It does inform your agencies like the World Bank or defeat to whoever is interested in it to sort of see it.
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Is there a peace dividend on average? You. Do we have to treat post-conflict countries differently?
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Because you might laugh about this, but until relatively recently, the World Bank did not make allowances for post-conflict countries.
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They were just treated like other poor countries. There were no special countries, country packages for them.
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So to my mind, these are going to be my concluding remarks on such a security and development is the problem of failing states.
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Everybody's got different names for these. So some people call them are failing, some fragile.
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Some call them low income countries under stress, like US countries.
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That's the World Bank. Countries in difficult partnerships.
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But I think we all know sort of what it means.
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And if I just sort of come up what sort of very broad definition these are countries that are not able to do basic things for their citizens.
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So, for example, they are unable to provide security to to their citizens and they're not able to end or they're not able to provide public goods.
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What do I mean by that said? These are they're not able to provide a framework that.
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And Abels people to lift themselves out of poverty.
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So these people who live in failing states are trapped in this cycle of poverty, underdevelopment and insecurity.
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And this is an awful lot of people, because when you look at these sort of countries and again,
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every agency is different, agency defines some differently.
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Most development agencies never publish a list because, you know, Haiti and Angola obviously in there.
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But what about Papua New Guinea?
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Is that in or out?
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Soren's who they don't want to have those sort of public discussions about it and they don't want to help sort of blacklists of of countries.
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But about one billion people in this world live in these failing states.
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And I've done some sort of statistical analysis on these states. And if we look at the countries that are low income,
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so failing states in this definition sort of includes countries that are providing really bad policies like Belarus and and a couple of other places,
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but they're actually not low income. So if you only look at the low income countries, then seven percent of the world's population live in those.
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So that's the Haiti's an Angola's. But 15 percent of the world's poor live in those countries.
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And over the last 15 years, they've had either zero growth or slightly negative growth rate.
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So they are stagnant. And think of what happened to the other countries that have got a lot of poor people like India and China in the last 15 years.
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Zoom. Yeah. They've zoomed ahead. So this is sort of decoupling effect is a divergence effect in the in the in the global economy,
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where people who live in the failing states and in particular ones in the in the in the very low income ones,
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they are sort of lagging further and further behind.
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And if this trend continues, we estimate that about 30 percent of the world's poor are going to live in these countries.
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And so on the topic of building political will, it's just a humanitarian concern.
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You know, we we we cannot allow that these countries disconnect that much from being from the worlds from the rest of the world's development.
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So since we economists, we've also put sort of a high price tag on this.
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So we think that it costs the world about this at two hundred and seventy billion U.S. dollars.
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Sorry, I forgot the dollar sign there per year. So these are the costs that are just generated by failing states.
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What are these costs, you might ask yourself? Well, short war causes a lot of costs.
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People get killed, but people don't only get killed. That also get you know, they have disabilities, which affects their sort of future lives.
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You're losing income. But you're also causing poverty.
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So the costs of war and poverty in the country. That's already quite a large cost.
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But these costs also spill-over into the region.
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Think of all the refugees and all the problems that bring this sort of typically they just people just walk across the border.
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So it's poor countries like Pakistan that have had to cope with millions of Afghani refugees over the years.
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So the highest. The overwhelming part of the of these costs of state failure are two countries in the region.
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And I think that actually raises a big and uncomfortable issues about the sovereignty of nations.
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So if their problems spill-over into the region and we didn't even try and attempt to look at the costs through the world,
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through drugs, because they're basically do come from very,
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very few places that are not Colombia and in Afghanistan, where a large parts of the country are not within,
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where the state monopoly of violence is sort of broken down. And this is where the drugs are produced.
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You get human trafficking, you get huge migration, forced migration from from those areas.
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Worldwide, I say you've got enormous sort of spill-over cost.
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And how does. Compared to the assistance that the world is at the moment giving to countries,
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so aid to these countries is about 80 billion U.S. dollars at moment per year.
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And even if donor countries fulfil their U.N. target of giving point seven percent of their annual income to to development aid,
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then at the moment this is only a few countries that actually do this, like Norway and Sweden and the Netherlands.
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Canada's sort of quite close to that.
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But anyhow, if if we don't a country did this than we had, then we would have one hundred and thirty billion U.S. dollars.
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You say it's nowhere near, you know, the sort of cost, just as a comparison.
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What state failure costs the world? So we really have to tackle this issue because unless we break this cycle of sick development.
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And and while underdevelopment and large scale violent conflict, these countries are going to fall further and further behind.
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And I'll stop that. Thank you.
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Thank you very much. I'm probably one of the few economists here, and you might ask yourself quite rightly,
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what economists have got to contribute to the whole topic of war and peace.
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So let me tell you, T.J., a little bit about what Paul and I have been doing for the last 10 years.
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So, first of all, we started by studying war, not peace.
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So what type of war? If you sort of look at how many wars there are, so this is just simply the number of wars.
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And then this is the end of the Second World War. And this is sort of more or less up to today.
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The Upsala prio dataset gives you the numbers.
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And this very light coloured one colonial war.
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So obviously they've sort of run out of from fashion because they know colonies any longer.
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And then they're international wars are the dark ones. They're very, very few of those.
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And the overwhelming majority of large scale violent conflict.
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So we're looking at conflicts that cause a thousand battle related deaths a year.
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These are military and civilian deaths. So civil war is the most common form of large scale violent conflict.
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So if you're looking only at those civil wars, again, I'm just looking at the numbers here.
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And then they were quite a few at the after the Second World War.
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And then it's sort of built up and reached peak in 92.
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And since the end of the Cold War, basically the world has become a safer place in terms of large scale, violent internal conflict.
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And for those of you who are in particularly interested in Africa, it's sort of Miro's very much the sort of global development.
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So, yes, the chance of the universities. Right. The world is now safer then than it previously was.
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So is an economist. I can sort of give you those sort of numbers and data handling sort of what I do day in, day out.
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So my research always centres on civil war. And we're looking at what causes the civil war.
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Why do civil wars break out once they've broken out?
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What is their duration and then what happens? War.
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So let me just sit and talk you through those. There's a diff different issues.
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So I'd start with the onset of civil war.
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And Paul and I have come up with a model of civil war which aims to sort of estimate which factors make a country more prone to civil war than others.
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And the method we are using is a global panel study.
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So let me be quite clear about this, because this is important to me that you understand how we work.
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So we basically borrow a method from medical science.
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So, for example, you can study what determines what makes a person prone to having a heart attack.
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So you can score people. You can sort of say heart attack, yes or no.
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And then you can sort of see does this person look at does this person smoke?
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What's the exercise regime? What's their cholesterol?
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And then you can sort of calculate which factors are most important at determining the risk of a heart attack.
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And this is exactly the same what we did with countries. So we've got all countries and we sort of look at did a war break heart, yes or no?
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And then what sort of characteristics does this does this country have said this was them?
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It's really a string of papers, but in particular this greed and grievance in civil war paper.
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So these explanations of civil war onset. So what sort of characteristics might make a country more conflict prone?
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We were sort of agnostic. We looked at economics as as one way of explaining it, because for us,
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the key in organising and maintaining large scale violent conflict is that you have to recruit and maintain a private army.
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And you need money for this and finances. So we sort of thought it must have something to do with economics.
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But we also look at political science. Explanations to democratic countries have less of a proneness, choose large scale bomb conflict sociology.
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So the difference between people in terms of religion or.
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Message to your class. Does that make a difference in the probability of experiencing a war history if you've already had a civil war,
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does that make you more conflict prone geography if you're more mountainous?
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If you a country's population is dispersed in a particular way, maybe more concentrated or more dispersed.
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Does that matter? So we do which predictive Gnostic and such are looking at what makes a country more conflict prone?
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If I give you a few conclusions from this onset model, we find very little evidence that the things that we can measure as grievances.
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So diversity in society, but that matters of religious or ethnic diversity matters.
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Income inequality also does not matter to does not make a country more conflict prone on average.
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Yeah, I'm stressing on average because we all know Uncle Joe, who should have turned 90 and smoked three packs a day and didn't have a heart attack.
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So there can always be a case, you know, where this is different.
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But this is on average economic factors are very important, sets the level, the growth and the structure of income that we found to be important.
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So first of all, the poorer you are, the more likely you are to have a civil war.
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So poverty really matters. And so that's the level of income.
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And if you've experienced a recent growth decline, then you're also more likely to have civil war.
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And these might have something to do with what we call opportunity costs.
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So you've got nothing to lose. You know, you might as well join a rebel army because there's very little other employment, formal employment possible.
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And you can sort of gain from taking part in this in this in this civil war.
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It might also give you access to education and might give you access to medical help.
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There are all sorts of different reasons why people might want to join a civil war movement.
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So the structure of income, what I mean here is sort of in particular,
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we found that if your country is rich in natural resources, then you're very conflict prone.
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So one example, of course, are the blood diamonds in Sierra Leone and Angola.
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But there are other examples of timber in Liberia.
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And think of the drugs in Afghanistan and Colombia,
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which have been financing those those wars fought for a long time and said these are very important.
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So these sort of sources of income are very important. Well, we also found was that if you have a large diaspora community,
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your wars have more conflict prone because these diaspora communities, for example, the Tamils.
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But also the Kurds. I mean, a lot of diaspora populations basically tax their population and send the money back home.
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And the hard currency actually can buy you a lot of weapons.
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And in particular, the case of the Tamil Tigers. That's very well documented. And this is very intuitive.
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The past conflict makes the country more conflict prone.
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So these are the cycles of violence that we heard and heard about just now.
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The good news is if you can maintain the peace for longer, the risk of a new civil war breaking out declines.
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So if you can manage to sort of stabilise the peace for longer and longer, longer, the better are the chances that it will continue to.
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That the country will remain peaceful. So this was more on the on the onset of of civil war.
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But what determines once the war is broken out, how long it lasts?
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So, first of all,
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we found that all these sort of factors that I've just gone through are not very important in determining the length of the civil war.
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In fact, there are very few variables that we could really nail down a sort of at explaining the duration of civil war.
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One thing that was quite important was natural resource prices. So if they, for example, go up, then the war continues for a bit longer.
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Statistically speaking, that's all I wanted to say about the duration of war for the for the moment because.
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I do not only study war, but I do want to study peace as well.
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So from my point of view, there are two main post-conflict challenges.
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One is the economic recovery. And one is the risk reduction of risk reduction in the sense of really peace building.
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How do you maintain the peace? So I'm first, can you talk about the economic recovery?
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And then I'm going to talk about the reduction of risk.
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And of course, this this is the development and this the security.
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And one cannot happen without the other.
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So Kofi Annan's sort of no security, without development, no development, without security is certainly right.
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But the instruments with which we obtain one or the other might not be the same.
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But these two are interdependent. Said the economic recovery.
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We first of all ask ourselves, is there a peace dividend after all, these countries are not spending all this much on killing each other any longer.
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And if there is such a spontaneous recovery process, is there teep peace dividend?
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And can the outside world help? Does aid increase the growth post-conflict?
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And does policy improve growth post-conflict?
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So if you're making reforms, these sort of windows of opportunity,
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some was talking about these sort of drivers of of of change in a post-conflict world.
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Do they actually help growth? And we were able to do an empirical analysis of post-conflict societies.
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There are not many studies of this ilk about. And as Simon already alluded to it,
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you are only really able to study this since the end of the Cold War because
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it was just too overlaid with all sorts of ideological problems previously.
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So I'm always facing a data problem in the sense that I can only look at relatively few post-conflict societies.
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I do find for the ones that I can study that there is about one per cent extra growth per year.
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And the good news is that you can, with aid, increase this extra growth.
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Interestingly, the timing is important here. It happens three to seven years after the end of the conflict.
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That aid can increase growth. But traditionally, this is not what donors have done.
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Just think what donors typically do, that the conflict stops.
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And there's been some sort of negotiated settlement and they all try come in with a lot of money.
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But the economy is really, really on its knees.
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So the absorptive capacity is just simply not there to sort of really use this aid in a growth enhancing away.
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Traditionally, those have also gone out really quickly.
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So it's sort of like they've ever won this country with a lot of aid and then the next disaster happens and they go into the next problem country.
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So our message has been quite clear. Go in slowly, build it up slowly.
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There is a deep dividend that you can reap an increase.
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And if the peace is maintained for about 10 years, then this poor country is just like any other poor country.
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And you can treat it like that as an aid donor.
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But you're really in there for the long haul. We're not talking to use here.
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We're talking 10 years. And that's been quite, quite a potent suggestion to policymakers.
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And we sort of looked at we, again, were gnostic about it.
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What sort of policies are particularly important?
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Is it the type of monetary inflationary sort of policies that the post-conflict people from the IMF would advertise?
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Or is it structural policies?
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The World Bank knows you go after trick, get your trade right, or you end sort of saying you have to really work on social inclusion.
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And that little bit of data I have for this is sort of tends to indicate that the growth
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process post-conflict is particularly sensitive to improvements in social policies.
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Probably no surprise to an audience like this. So this has been on economic recovery.
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So it's really important to sort of because we know we reduce the risk of a new conflict breaking out when people have opportunities,
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when they have employment, when they have some sort of prosperity or at least hope that it will get better.
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One, when there is sort of growth in this sort of trickle through process. Okay.
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But can you actually sort of can we actually say something about the reduction
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of the risk through military expenditure that we just think for a minute?
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The the risk of having a renewed conflict is really high.
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You have about a 40 percent, 40 percent of all peace processes collapse within a decade.
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And so my question, one of my questions will be, can you actually reduce this risk by spending on the army?
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And important, I looked at this. And we actually find that if the country increases military spending and post-conflict,
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that it does exactly the opposite, it doesn't bring the rest down. So the idea I deter the rebel movement,
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either the old one or this or any new ones by sort of increasing my military expenditure, that simply doesn't work.
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It's also really tragic that a lot of post conflict governments do exactly that.
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They do increase their military expenditure.
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It's obvious to you that during the war, military expenditure goes up, but after the war's ended, it does not go back to the pre-war level.
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And these are extremely poor countries.
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We're talking about countries that have enormous needs in terms of health and education and infrastructure needs.
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So this is really sad and it does not deter new rebellions breaking out.
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So what about U.N. peacekeeping or coalitions of the willing?
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Do they actually help to prolong the peace? Said coalitions of the willing.
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I have got no data on. But what I can. Lockhart and what.
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What we didn't look at were U.N. peacekeeping operations.
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So at the moment that there is very little that there are very few studies cross country on peace building efforts.
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I'm sort of trying to think a little bit through what typically happens in post-conflict practise.
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And this is a sort of very rough sketch. And people who do this in more detail might be unhappy with this.
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But I sort of think there's some typically there's a negotiated settlement.
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About half of all conflicts end with a negotiated settlement.
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A quarter of one by the government outright and a quarter are one by rebels.
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So negotiated settlements is the sort of most typical.
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And two to two war. Then there is very often a light presence of peacekeeping troops and there's some effort of pump priming democracy.
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And the external actors maintain the light footprint.
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Then you have post-conflict elections and then you have democracy and you can withdraw everybody.
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So this is sort of my caricature of what seems to happen in a lot of post-conflict situations.
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So we started this statistically. So we had these 68 post-conflict episodes and as had 40 percent of all of these conflicts record with in the decade,
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says a really important issue to sort of get this get get this right.
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So what did we find from statistical results? So what prolongs the peace?
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First of all, there is really no safe period in the first decade.
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It's not that once you've had two years of peace, you're in a much safer place.
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Or once you've had four years of peace, you're a much safer place.
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You really. There's no such thing. You really have to sort of be in there for that for for the long haul.
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Keep in mind that the U.N. typically budgets for two years for for peacekeeping operations.
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So this is certainly not enough. So growth is very important.
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So a stagnant economy has a bout of a 42 percent risk of having another conflict.
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But if you manage 10 percent income growth might seem very high to you.
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But places like Uganda have come close to this.
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Then you really substantially reduce the risk of of having another conflict.
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So it's from goes from 40 to 27 percent. Elections, elections are always really featured is incredibly important.
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And unfortunately, I must say very often also as a departure date for peacekeeping troops to withdraw.
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So what do the elections do? The post-conflict risk? Nothing.
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Statistically speaking, nothing. Just before the election, the risk is slightly down.
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And after the elections, the risk is slightly up. But overall, there's no effect.
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I haven't got that many subsequent elections. But they don't seem to have a different effect either of the few that I have.
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Peacekeeping rarely works. If we double expenditure for for a post-conflict country, this risk of 40 percent is reduced to 31 percent.
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So let me just sort of come up with some sort of ideas on the post-conflict.
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General, general ideas about the post-conflict challenges. They are very fragile.
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We've heard that term from Simon already. But, you know, the statistics are very clear on this 40 percent or so high,
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a high proportion of post-conflict peace efforts that collapse democracy and elections are obviously intrinsically desirable,
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but they don't give you peace. So would you have come to the conclusion that you really need a package of military
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and economic assistance and you need this for a considerable period of time,
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10 years? This is this is what, you know, international agency judges should be looking at.
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Of course, our results are exclusively statistical.
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And you really have to apply this knowledge to the local situation.
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And I think this is very often being misunderstood. So, for example, we get military people who sort of come and sort of say to us,
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you've got these models where you can predict that the peace will break down or that a conflict breaks out.
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Countries sort of just give us an estimate of this in this country.
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And I'm always sort of aghast. You know, people want to use our model line.
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This, of course, I can crank the data through this, but it isn't a particularly useful way of.
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It's not an early warning system. And you know what? Through your foreign office and all your other sort of channels of information,
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you should be much better placed to sort of find out about these things than using a relatively
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crass and crude method of of of conflict prediction and the call you have for a model.
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So it's not very good about predicting the individuals countries risk.
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Yeah. For example, if you wanted to find about your heart attack risk,
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you don't go through this sort of big public health model because you know much more about that.
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It's much more detailed information. You know, you know, whether your brother has died of a heart attack, you know the family history.
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You'd know an awful lot more things than this sort of big mortal could sort of ever look at.
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But for public health prescriptions, the model,
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the heart attack model that I sort of laid out is very important because then you can sort of decide as a public policymaker,
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how much money do I want to earmark towards reducing smoking and other visibly other health initiatives?
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And this is exactly how I think people have to sort of see the statistical efforts that we're pursuing.
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It does inform your agencies like the World Bank or defeat to whoever is interested in it to sort of see it.
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Is there a peace dividend on average? You. Do we have to treat post-conflict countries differently?
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Because you might laugh about this, but until relatively recently, the World Bank did not make allowances for post-conflict countries.
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They were just treated like other poor countries. There were no special countries, country packages for them.
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So to my mind, these are going to be my concluding remarks on such a security and development is the problem of failing states.
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Everybody's got different names for these. So some people call them are failing, some fragile.
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Some call them low income countries under stress, like US countries.
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That's the World Bank. Countries in difficult partnerships.
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But I think we all know sort of what it means.
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And if I just sort of come up what sort of very broad definition these are countries that are not able to do basic things for their citizens.
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So, for example, they are unable to provide security to to their citizens and they're not able to end or they're not able to provide public goods.
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What do I mean by that said? These are they're not able to provide a framework that.
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And Abels people to lift themselves out of poverty.
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So these people who live in failing states are trapped in this cycle of poverty, underdevelopment and insecurity.
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And this is an awful lot of people, because when you look at these sort of countries and again,
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every agency is different, agency defines some differently.
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Most development agencies never publish a list because, you know, Haiti and Angola obviously in there.
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But what about Papua New Guinea?
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Is that in or out?
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Soren's who they don't want to have those sort of public discussions about it and they don't want to help sort of blacklists of of countries.
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But about one billion people in this world live in these failing states.
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And I've done some sort of statistical analysis on these states. And if we look at the countries that are low income,
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so failing states in this definition sort of includes countries that are providing really bad policies like Belarus and and a couple of other places,
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but they're actually not low income. So if you only look at the low income countries, then seven percent of the world's population live in those.
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So that's the Haiti's an Angola's. But 15 percent of the world's poor live in those countries.
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And over the last 15 years, they've had either zero growth or slightly negative growth rate.
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So they are stagnant. And think of what happened to the other countries that have got a lot of poor people like India and China in the last 15 years.
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Zoom. Yeah. They've zoomed ahead. So this is sort of decoupling effect is a divergence effect in the in the in the global economy,
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where people who live in the failing states and in particular ones in the in the in the very low income ones,
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they are sort of lagging further and further behind.
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And if this trend continues, we estimate that about 30 percent of the world's poor are going to live in these countries.
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And so on the topic of building political will, it's just a humanitarian concern.
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You know, we we we cannot allow that these countries disconnect that much from being from the worlds from the rest of the world's development.
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So since we economists, we've also put sort of a high price tag on this.
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So we think that it costs the world about this at two hundred and seventy billion U.S. dollars.
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Sorry, I forgot the dollar sign there per year. So these are the costs that are just generated by failing states.
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What are these costs, you might ask yourself? Well, short war causes a lot of costs.
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People get killed, but people don't only get killed. That also get you know, they have disabilities, which affects their sort of future lives.
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You're losing income. But you're also causing poverty.
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So the costs of war and poverty in the country. That's already quite a large cost.
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But these costs also spill-over into the region.
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Think of all the refugees and all the problems that bring this sort of typically they just people just walk across the border.
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So it's poor countries like Pakistan that have had to cope with millions of Afghani refugees over the years.
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So the highest. The overwhelming part of the of these costs of state failure are two countries in the region.
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And I think that actually raises a big and uncomfortable issues about the sovereignty of nations.
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So if their problems spill-over into the region and we didn't even try and attempt to look at the costs through the world,
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through drugs, because they're basically do come from very,
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very few places that are not Colombia and in Afghanistan, where a large parts of the country are not within,
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where the state monopoly of violence is sort of broken down. And this is where the drugs are produced.
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You get human trafficking, you get huge migration, forced migration from from those areas.
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Worldwide, I say you've got enormous sort of spill-over cost.
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And how does. Compared to the assistance that the world is at the moment giving to countries,
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so aid to these countries is about 80 billion U.S. dollars at moment per year.
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And even if donor countries fulfil their U.N. target of giving point seven percent of their annual income to to development aid,
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then at the moment this is only a few countries that actually do this, like Norway and Sweden and the Netherlands.
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Canada's sort of quite close to that.
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But anyhow, if if we don't a country did this than we had, then we would have one hundred and thirty billion U.S. dollars.
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You say it's nowhere near, you know, the sort of cost, just as a comparison.
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What state failure costs the world? So we really have to tackle this issue because unless we break this cycle of sick development.
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And and while underdevelopment and large scale violent conflict, these countries are going to fall further and further behind.
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And I'll stop that. Thank you.
