New Issues in the Twenty-First Century

The twenty-first century has seen a focus on several areas which had hitherto been relatively neglected. These came to the fore in response both to develop­ments on the ground and to changing global concerns.

Conflict: Analysis of human development and poverty across countries showed that the worst performers were almost invariably in conflict. Moreover, the end of the Cold War saw an escalation in the number of civil wars. As a result, analysis of the economic causes and consequences of war was initiated by Collier and Hoeffler at CSAE and FitzGerald and Stewart at QEH.

Collier and Hoeffler's work on the causes and consequences of conflict has been widely recognised. Famously, they differentiated between “greed” and “grievance” as a cause of conflict and, in one of the early econometric exercises to identify causes, argued that grievances—in the form of inequality, political rights and ethnic or religious polarisation—were insignificant, whereas per capita income and growth, primary commodities as a share of exports and the size of the diaspora population were significantly associated with the outbreak of conflict. They interpreted the latter variables as proxies for opportunity or greed, although they agreed that low incomes might also be a form of griev­ance (Collier and Hoeffler 2004). Later work focused on “feasibility” as the main explanation of conflict, arguing with empirical evidence that grievance was unimportant, and conflict occurred where it was feasible financially and from a military perspective (Collier et al. 2009). However, Collier also led an influential World Bank study on conflict which argued that poverty (i.e. low average per capita incomes) was both cause and consequence of conflict (Collier et al.

Two major studies on conflict were undertaken at QEH: First, a multi­country study directed by FitzGerald and Stewart on the economics of war- affected economies, showing the macro and meso mechanisms which lead to the negative economic and social impact of conflict, which extend far beyond the immediate deaths. The study suggested a number of policies which might mitigate these effects, even during war (Stewart 1993; Stewart and FitzGerald 2000). Second, Stewart led a research centre at ODID—the Centre for Research on Inequality, Human Security and Ethnicity—investigating the causes of conflict, including eight country studies. The main conclusion of these studies was that multidimensional “horizontal” inequalities (inequalities across a variety of identity groups) were significantly associated with the out­break of conflict, even though vertical inequality (inequality among individu­als) had been shown not to be significantly associated with conflict by Collier and Hoeffler, among others. The Centre analysed the policy implications of this finding for conflict-prevention and post-conflict policies, with a particu­lar focus on policies towards affirmative action and the special issues for policy in resource-abundant economies (Stewart 2008; Thorp et al. 2012). The sig­nificant role of horizontal inequalities in raising the risk of conflict, initiated by Stewart at Oxford (Stewart 2000), has been supported by much subsequent empirical research (Cederman et al. 2011; Hillesund et al. 2018). Work on horizontal inequalities continued beyond analysis of conflict to con­sidering the causes of persistent horizontal inequality, the relationship with democracy, and issues of justice, as well as policy analysis (Stewart and Langer 2008; Thorp and Paredes 2010; Brown et al. 2012; Stewart 2014).

Gender Aspects of Rural Transformation: Gender aspects of development were very much present in Heyer and Harriss-White's investigations into vil­lage and small-town India, as noted above, but the importance of gender was brought to the fore in Oxford by Cheryl Doss who joined ODID in 2016.

A second theme concerns understanding gender and rural transformation, with a particular focus on the impact of men's migration on women left behind. Using mixed methods, she has explored the impact on female empow­erment in Nepal, showing how patterns differ depending on whether the women live in nuclear households or are the mother-in-law or daughter-in­law in a joint household.

Third, Doss is moving beyond the traditional approach to household sur­veys, in which survey data is collected from one member of the household, typically the household head, to interview multiple people in the household. This approach generated new challenges, since husbands and wives often report different answers. In particular, in many contexts when wives report that they co-own land and housing with their husbands, their husbands report themselves as the sole owners. Similarly, different answers occur with respect to who is involved in household decision-making. She is exploring explana­tions for these differences, arguing that it is not due simply to measurement error or different understandings of the question, but asymmetric informa­tion and the fact that neither spouse has full information about the other.

work out why a particular person makes a decision (Doss and Meinzen-Dick 2015; Ambler et al. 2021).

Analysis and Measurement of Poverty: The widening of development objec­tives associated with Sen's capability analysis and the human development approach led to a recognition that the definition and measurement of poverty should be correspondingly enlarged. At QEH, Susana Franco, Harriss-White, Caterina Ruggeri Laderchi, Ruhi Saith and Stewart showed that alternative definitions of poverty—monetary, capability and participatory as well as mea­sures of social exclusion—gave very different answers to the question of who was poor on the basis of research in India and Peru (Ruggeri Laderchi et al. 2003; Stewart et al. 2007).

Alkire investigated the variety of conceptions of well-being among poor women in India with the aim of giving practical meaning to the objective of widening capabilities (Alkire 2002). Adopting a capability approach, the work of Alkire and the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) (a centre at ODID initiated by Alkire) has been largely devoted to the devel­opment of a multidimensional measure of capability poverty and its applica­tion across the world. In path-breaking work, Alkire and Foster produced a new method for measuring multidimensional poverty—the multidimensional poverty index (MPI) (Alkire and Foster 2008, 2011; Alkire 2015). The method allows decomposition across ethnicities and regions and measures of inequalities among the poor (OPHI and UNDP 2019). The MPI is now applied globally as well as nationally, where it has guided policy in several countries, including Mexico and Nepal. The global MPI, which is produced jointly by OPHI and the UNDP, covered 101 countries in 2019.

Environment: Rather little research has been done on this topic by Oxford economists. Joshi has worked on “fairness” in climate change mitigation gener­ally and in relation to India (Joshi and Patel 2009), while Harriss-White led a major study of the carbon footprint of different rice production and distribu­tion systems in India (Harriss-White et al. 2019). This was followed by a study of the waste economy in a small town in South India (Harriss-White 2020). Harriss-White also wrote on Karl Marx's and Justus von Liebig's ideas on eco­logical restitution in theoretical work arising from this (Harriss-White 2019).

4