Resource Dependence and Armed Violence: Impact on Sustainability in Developing Countries

The dependence on oil, gas, and mineral exports arguably has a negative impact on economic growth in resource-rich, developing countries. This article looks at the impact of resource dependence on adjusted net savings (ANS) as an indicator of weak sustainability. Our results, based on a panel of 104 developing countries during the recent commodity price boom, confirm a negative relationship between resource extraction and sustainable development as measured by ANS. We further look at the specific role of armed conflict and armed violence as captured by the homicide rate. Armed conflict, which is positively associated with resource dependence, negatively affects ANS per capita according to both our OLS and instrumental variables (IV) estimates. Similarly, armed violence has a detrimental effect on sustainable development. Our IV estimate suggests that a one-point increase in the homicide rate decreases ANS per capita by $60. Since education expenditures are a critical ANS component, we further examine the impact of resource dependence and violence on human capital. Consistent with previous findings, resource-dependent countries underinvest in education but armed conflict and violence do not affect the instantaneous share of education expenditures, hinting at a detrimental effect working through physical and social capital rather than education.     

The next decade of logistics research

Pathbreaking logistics research over the next 10 years will focus on systems problems. Whereas past research generally has taken a “bottom-up” approach, future investigations are likely to pursue a “top-down” philosophy. Specifically, attention will concentrate on diagnosis of systems' improvement potentials; easy-to-use analytic approaches, inherently approximative, will be devised for quickly ascertaining whether a complex operating system can be substantially and effectively improved. Theories to assist in overall systems design, particularly the setting of boundaries and buffers among systems components, will be developed. At the same time, techniques for accurately forecasting future systems performance will be investigated. Underlying such research will be efforts to gain better understanding of management information requirements, including approaches for monitoring systems performance and providing early warning detection of systems degradation Improved management information systems will have to be coupled with appropriate design of managerial organizations and assignment of decision making responsibilities. Important avenues of research will he development of robust approaches, that is, both mathematical techniques and organizational approaches that are not too adversely affected by limited data, a changing environment, and human frailly. Finally, critical research will be directed at the implementation process, especially the interaction among initiation, design, testing and ultimate adoption This prognosis will explore the above themes in the context of large-scale, complex systems. The decision areas will encompass inventory replenishment, multiechelon hierarchies for stockage and maintenance, procurement, transportation, scheduling, facilities planning, budgeting, reliability and personnel management.     

Generalized programming by linear approximation of the dual gradient: Equality constraints

A modified generalized programming procedure is presented for solving concave programming problems with equality constraints. The procedure constructs convenient linear approximations of the gradient of the dual and finds points where the approximating functions vanish. In the quadratic programming case, the procedure is finitely convergent. Global convergence is established for the non-quadratic case. Illustrative numerical examples are included.     

OF HAWKS AND DOVES

The policies toward countries aspiring to acquire nuclear weapons continue to be heavily contested, differing even among countries that consider nuclear proliferation as one of the main threats to international security. This article maps the actual policies of liberal democracies toward Iran and North Korea along a continuum from confrontation to accommodation. Using data from an expert survey, the authors outline four main findings. First, policies toward both Iran and North Korea have become increasingly confrontational over time. Second, no policy convergence was observed among the states studied; that is, notwithstanding the adoption of joint sanctions, differences remained between states preferring confrontation and those opting for accommodation. Third, states maintained remarkably stable policy profiles over time. Finally, despite obvious differences between the norm violations of North Korea and Iran, states generally followed remarkably similar policies toward both countries. The authors’ findings indicate that states exhibit stable preferences for either confrontation or accommodation toward nuclear aspirants. Although a comprehensive examination of the causes of these policy differences is beyond the scope of this article, the authors present evidence that a major cleavage exists between members and non-members of the Non-Aligned Movement, indicating that the degree to which nuclear aspirants’ sovereignty should be respected is a main issue of contention.     

India and Pakistan: Bargaining in the Shadow of Nuclear War

Based on the experience of the Cold War, some scholars hoped that the introduction of nuclear weapons into South Asia would promote peace between India and Pakistan. Instead, nuclear weapons made Pakistan less fearful of India's conventional military forces, and therefore help explain recent conflicts between them. Moreover, US expressions of concern about the possibility of inadvertent nuclear war in South Asia may have provided an incentive to both sides to be intransigent in order to elicit US intervention.     

The lower bounded and partial upper bounded distribution model

This paper pruvides a smaller equivalelnt bounded variable transportation problem than that in Charnes, Glover, and Klingman [1] for the lower bounded and partial upper bounded distribution model.     

The challenges of Iraq: putting US Army stability operations doctrine to the test

The US Army develops doctrine as a set of fundamental principles that guide its actions in support of national objectives. Recently, those national objectives required stability operations, with increasing scope and frequency. This study examines whether existing US Army doctrine adequately fulfilled its role as a guide to tactics in addressing the challenges that Army forces faced in the first 15 months of the war in Iraq. Field Manual 3-24 Counterinsurgency has remedied many deficiencies, but several remain to be addressed to offer commanders better guidance in the face of the many complex challenges they face in stability operations.     

Group testing procedures with quantitative features and incomplete identification

We present a group testing model for items characterized by marker random variables. An item is defined to be good (defective) if its marker is below (above) a given threshold. The items can be tested in groups; the goal is to obtain a prespecified number of good items by testing them in optimally sized groups. Besides this group size, the controller has to select a threshold value for the group marker sums, and the target number of groups which by the tests are classified to consist only of good items. These decision variables have to be chosen so as to minimize a cost function, which is a linear combination of the expected number of group tests and an expected penalty for missing the desired number of good items, subject to constraints on the probabilities of misclassifications. We treat two models of this kind: the first one is based on an infinite population size, whereas the second one deals with the case of a finite number of available items. All performance measures are derived in closed form; approximations are also given. Furthermore, we prove monotonicity properties of the components of the objective function and of the constraints. In several examples, we study (i) the dependence of the cost function on the decision variables and (ii) the dependence of the optimal values of the decision variables (group size, group marker threshold, and stopping rule for groups classified as clean) and of the target functionals (optimal expected number of tests, optimal expected penalty, and minimal expected cost) on the system parameters.© 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2011     

Nuclear Fusion Power for Weapons Purposes

Fusion reactors have the potential to be used for military purposes. This article provides quantitative estimates about weapon-relevant materials produced in future commercial fusion reactors and discusses how suitable such materials are for use in nuclear weapons. Whether states will consider such use in the future will depend on specific regulatory, political, economic, and technical boundary conditions. Based on expert interviews and the political science literature, we identify three of these conditions that could determine whether fusion power will have a military dimension in the second half of this century: first, the technological trajectory of global energy policies; second, the management of a peaceful power transition between rising and declining powers; and third, the overall acceptance of the nuclear normative order. Finally, the article discusses a few regulatory options that could be implemented by the time fusion reactors reach technological maturity and become commercially available; such research on fusion reactor safeguards should start as early as possible and accompany the current research on experimental fusion reactors.     

Resilience as the EU Global Strategy’s new leitmotif: pragmatic,problematic or promising?

A striking difference between the EU’s 2016 Global Strategy and its 2003 predecessor is the ubiquity of resilience as a new leitmotif, understood as the ability of states and societies to reform, thus withstanding and recovering from internal and external crisis. Resilience provides a middle ground between over-ambitious liberal peace-building and under-ambitious stability, (re)directs attention to local resources and practices, and is ambiguous enough to be acceptable to everyone. The Global Strategy’s leitmotif is an example of the rise and spread of resilience in international discourses about crisis management and humanitarian emergencies. Although there are risks inherent to the way in which resilience reframes risks and crises, its added value lies in its power as convening concept, opening up international organizations to new ways of thinking and working, and providing a common ground for engagement.