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29-04-2021 | Short note

A replication note on humanitarian aid and violence

Author: Sébastien Mary

Published in: Empirical Economics | Issue 3/2022

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Abstract

A recent systematic review by Zurcher (World Develop 98: 506–522, 2017) finds that humanitarian aid unequivocally increases violence. This note demonstrates that this conclusion is not warranted by a careful examination of the studies included in the abovementioned systematic review. We highlight the incorrect interpretation of econometric results and the lack of robustness in the sampled studies. We also replicate three studies, and report mixed evidence on the effect of humanitarian aid on violence.

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The review also provides a detailed description of the potential causal mechanisms between development aid and violence.

We have reached out to the author to get access to the dataset, but have not received a response.

Note that these papers have been cited, respectively, 56, 46, and 6 times according to Google Scholar (as of 5/14/2019). Zurcher (2017) has been cited 16 times. The moderate amount of citations should not understate the influence of these papers. Their findings are implicitly translated into critical policy guidance (e.g., Central Intelligence Agency’s World Threat Assessment 2014; Global Food Security Act 2016).

The reader is referred to Zurcher (2017) for an in-depth discussion of the links between humanitarian aid and violence. We briefly summarize the key mechanisms in this section.

This applies to Narang (2015) in that some countries do not experience civil war or peace at all during the observed period.

Interestingly, Narang (2015) provides this robustness test in Appendix 3, but results are neither fully reported nor discussed.

We identify a similar problem in Narang (2014). More details can be found in Appendix.

Lindner and McConnell (2018) suggest that it is because matching cannot easily distinguish between short-term fluctuations in outcomes and more structural outcome trends.

Note that the main author in Wood and Sullivan (2015) has confirmed via email that they used this specification in a working paper.

We can compare the coefficients in columns 2 and 3 Table 7, by computing the z statistic following the correction suggested by Paternoster et al. (1998), and suggest that the estimates are not statistically different from one another.

This is not a problem in both DID analyses revisited in this paper.

The interaction term’s hazard ratio is significant at 5% in column 1, suggesting that the effect of aid is different for wars with a decisive victory than the effect of aid in wars ending with a non-decisive victory. However, this result is not statistically robust across Table 2 as the interaction’s significance does not pass the 5% level in other columns (but passes the 10% level).

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Title: A replication note on humanitarian aid and violence
Author: Sébastien Mary
Publication date: 29-04-2021
Publisher: Springer Berlin Heidelberg
Published in: Empirical Economics / Issue 3/2022
Print ISSN: 0377-7332
Electronic ISSN: 1435-8921
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00181-021-02064-w

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