Archive for October 6th, 2021

Scapegoating of ethnic minorities: Experimental evidence from Eastern Slovakia

October 6, 2021

Team of researchers (Michal Bauer, Jana Cahlíková, Julie Chytilová, Gérard Roland, Tomáš Želinský) in this voxeu research:

Scapegoating refers to a social phenomenon whereby members of an aggrieved majority group retaliate against innocent third parties, usually members of vulnerable minority groups. This column uses an experiment set up between May and September 2017 in Eastern Slovakia – where a large Roma minority regularly suffers from discrimination – to measure how an injustice that affects a member of one’s own group shapes the punishment of an unconnected bystander (or scapegoat). The experiment shows that members of a majority group will systematically shift punishment onto innocent members of an ethnic minority. 

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Our evidence of the scapegoating behaviour has several implications. First, it suggests that courts and other settings in which people make punishment choices are particularly scapegoating-prone environments, in line with evidence of strong biases against minorities in judicial decisions (Alesina and Ferrara 2014, Shayo and Zussman 2011). Second, the results suggest that ethnic minorities are at greater risk of facing aggressive behaviour when social problems within the dominant group become salient features of the social environment; thus, the protection of minorities need to be reinforced to rein in this type of behaviour. Third, we show that spikes in aggressive behaviour may not be driven by changes in economic incentives, which strengthens the case for taking seriously the behavioural channels, including scapegoating, through which deterioration of the social environment may fuel inter-group conflicts.

 

Posted in Academic research & research papers, Economics - macro, micro etc | Leave a Comment »

Reading the economic history of Aghanistan

October 6, 2021

Prof Tirthankar Roy of LSE in this interesting paper discusses economic history Afghanistan:

Twentieth-century Afghanistan offers a lesson for the historian of comparative economic development. Two conditions help to understand Afghan history better, resource poverty and the absence of European colonial rule. In a resource-poor region, the possibility of rapid economic change depends to a great extent on the capability and stability of the states; at the same time, attempts to create strong centres of power with a weak tax base can generate debilitating conflicts. European colonialists in some cases managed to overcome the dilemma. In the absence of colonialism, old elites and old rivalries survived and intensified the conflict. These two features appeared in the histories of many of the world’s poor regions. They shaped the process of economic and political change in Afghanistan with great force.

Posted in Academic research & research papers, Economics - macro, micro etc, Growth and development | Leave a Comment »

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