Guns and Butter? Fighting Violence with the Promise of Development

Gaurav Khanna and Laura Zimmermann

No 9160, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: There is growing awareness that development-oriented government policies may be an important counterinsurgency strategy, but existing papers are usually unable to disentangle various mechanisms. Using a regression-discontinuity design, we analyze the impact of one of the world's largest anti-poverty programs, India's NREGS, on the intensity of Maoist conflict. We find short-run increases of insurgency-related violence, police-initiated attacks, and insurgent attacks on civilians. We discuss how these results relate to established theories in the literature. The main mechanism consistent with the empirical patterns is that NREGS induces civilians to share more information with the state, improving police effectiveness.

Keywords: public works program; National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme; NREGA; NREGS; India; regression discontinuity design; terrorism; Naxalites; Maoists; conflict; insurgency; civil war (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H12 H53 H56 I38 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 70 pages
Date: 2015-06
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

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Journal Article: Guns and butter? Fighting violence with the promise of development (2017)
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