Anders Olofsgård

Den 24 februari 2022 attackerade Ryssland, oprovocerat och i strid med internationell rätt, Ukraina. Denna attack var en eskalering av det angrepp som började redan 2014 med annekteringen av Krim och krigföring i östra Ukraina. Det fullskaliga kriget har snart pågått i tre år och har, oavsett vad som händer i närtid, förändrat säkerhetsläget i Europa för lång tid framöver. Västvärldens tydliga respons med omfattande sanktioner mot Ryssland samt militärt och ekonomiskt stöd till Ukraina indikerar att de flesta inser att Rysslands agerande är ett hot inte bara mot Ukraina utan hela den demokratiska världsordningen. I detta sammanhang är det centralt att förstå att i en militärkonflikt är relativ styrka avgörande, därför är sanktioner mot Ryssland och stöd till Ukraina ömsesidigt kompletterande insatser. Ansträngningarna måste syfta till att både minska Rysslands förmåga att föra krig och samtidigt stärka Ukrainas motståndskraft.

On 24 February 2022, Russia launched an unprovoked attack on Ukraine, in clear violation of international law. This aggression represented an escalation of the conflict that began in 2014 with the annexation of Crimea and the onset of warfare in eastern Ukraine. The full-scale war has now persisted for almost three years and, regardless of near-term developments, has permanently altered Europe’s security landscape. The unequivocal response from the West—with extensive sanctions imposed on Russia alongside significant military and economic support for Ukraine—demonstrates a widespread recognition that Russia’s actions pose a threat not only to Ukraine but also to the entire democratic world order. In this context, it is crucial to understand that relative strength is paramount in any military conflict; thus, sanctions against Russia and support for Ukraine are mutually complementary efforts. These measures must be directed simultaneously at reducing Russia’s capacity to wage war and at bolstering Ukraine’s resilience.

We designed and randomly evaluated the impact of a textbooks for self-study scheme in eastern DRC targeting student achievement in primary schools. Students in treatment schools were seven percentage points more likely to pass the national exam, and those who passed obtained higher scores. We also evidence higher scores on a French language test. The effects are primarily driven by student interest in textbooks, frequency of doing homework and motivation to go to school and continue education. Student achievement can thus be improved by intensified and diversified use of existing learning materials in poor and fragile settings.

This report was commissioned by the National Institute of Economic Research (NIER) from the Stockholm Institute of Transition Economics at the Stockholm School of Economics (SITE) to analyze the Russian economy in the shadow of Russia’s war against Ukraine. The analysis includes a background of how the Russian economy worked before the war, detailing how important international oil prices changes have been for economic growth. It also provides a description of the political economy of the Russian economic system and what the trade patterns were prior to 2022. The report then focus on a wide range of economic indicators as reported by Russian authorities and discuss how this is now part of the Russian war propaganda. This includes indicators of fiscal and monetary policy, trade, reserves and the financial system. Inflation and economic growth are particularly important components of the propaganda narrative, and the report provides a critical review of official statistics for these key economic indicators. It also provides some alternative measures of inflation and growth that paints a very different picture of the Russian economy compared to the official numbers. Since the start of Russia’s war against Ukraine, the Western coalition that support Ukraine have introduced sanctions with the aim to restrict the resources available to Russia in waging this war. The report details these sanctions and how they impact the Russian economy. The sanctions have a direct bearing on the medium and longer-term outlook for the Russian economy, including on fundamental growth factors and the increasing risk of a full-blown economic crisis in Russia which is discussed in a separate section in the report. The report ends with a concluding section that summarizes the main ideas of the report. It then also adds a rich list of reference for further reading and analysis for the interested reader as well as an appendix that provide a more comprehensive timeline of the sanction that have been introduce so far.

We estimate the community-level impact of foreign aid projects on women's empowerment in the country with the most complete recent record of geo-coded aid project placement, Malawi. Our estimates can thus be interpreted as the average impact of aid from many different donors and diverse projects. We find that aid in general has a positive impact, in particular on an index of female agency and women's sexual and fertility preferences. Gender-targeted aid has a further positive impact on women's sexual and fertility preferences , and more tentatively on an index focusing on gender-based violence. However, the positive impact of gender-targeted aid disappears in patrilineal communities, and men's attitudes towards female agency in the areas of sexuality and fertility are even negatively affected. This suggests that donors need to consider that the impact of aid on female empowerment can depend on the community context when they decide on aid project design and placement.

Objective
The middle class has historically played a decisive role in mass movements and rebellions against the status quo, including in both peaceful and violent protests that spread throughout the Middle East and North Africa following the events of the Arab Spring. Yet, we know little about why the middle class tends to be over-represented in protest movements, or why that protest takes nonviolent versus violent forms.

Methods
We develop a model in which protest constitutes a “costly” signal of discontent, where violent actions are more costly than peaceful demonstrations and where the cost of action increases with individual income. Under such assumptions, the upper-middle class will engage in nonviolent protest, the lower middle class will support violence against the government, while the poorest and richest will abstain from opposition activities.

Results
Survey data from the World Values Survey and the Gallup World Poll across 20 Arab countries supports these hypotheses. Using both parametric and semi-parametric analyses, we find that participation in nonviolent protests and general strikes rises from the first (lowest) and peaks at the fourth income quintile, then declines thereafter. Meanwhile, support for political violence rises sharply between the first and second quintiles, falling for individuals in the upper quintiles. Our findings are robust to broader measures of wealth and status, as well as to corrections for regime type, levels of regime support, and joint determination of anti-regime behaviors.

Conclusions
These findings shed light on why certain socioeconomic groups engage in anti-governmental behaviors, while others do not, and suggest that income subgroups within the middle class may choose different modalities of protest.

We test the hypothesis that aid recipient governments are better able to utilize aid flows for political favoritism during periods in which they are of geo-strategic value to major donors. We examine the effect of a country’s (non-permanent) membership on the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) on the subnational distribution of World Bank aid. Specifically, we analyze whether World Bank projects are targeted to subnational regions in which the head of state was born, or to regions dominated by the same ethnic group as that of the head of state. We find that all regions within a recipient country, on average, receive a greater number of aid projects during UNSC membership years. Moreover, a leader’s co-ethnic regions (but not birth regions) receive significantly more World Bank projects and loan commitments during UNSC membership years compared to other years. This effect is driven chiefly by interest-bearing loans from the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD). Most importantly, we find stronger subnational political bias in aid allocation for aid recipients whose UNSC votes are fully aligned with those of the United States, indicating that exchanges of aid for favors occur in multilateral settings. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.