Guns and butter? Fighting violence with the promise of development

Gaurav Khanna and Laura Zimmermann

Journal of Development Economics, 2017, vol. 124, issue C, 120-141

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. One 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; India; Regression-discontinuity design; Conflict (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H12 H53 H56 I38 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (46)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304387816300773
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Guns and Butter? Fighting Violence with the Promise of Development (2015)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:deveco:v:124:y:2017:i:c:p:120-141

DOI: 10.1016/j.jdeveco.2016.09.006

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Development Economics is currently edited by M. R. Rosenzweig

More articles in Journal of Development Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().