The 2025 Best Visualization Award has been awarded to Justin Hastings & @davidubilava.bsky.social (@sydney.edu.au) for their article entitled 'Agricultural roots of social conflict in Southeast Asia'.
Congratulations to the authors! 👏
📢 Read the full announcement: www.prio.org/journals/jpr...
"it depends" being a close contender.
And thanks!
There are a range of estimates/numbers that have been floating around. I have mostly looked into cereal/wheat production and it's been reported at around 20-35% of the revenue. So, not a trivial amount, by any means.
The answer, to that question, is "probably no." Share of fertilizer in any food item is tiny, especially in high income countries. Farmers will bear the cost, no doubt. But much is going to depend on for how long this conflict lingers and, especially, if markets remain disrupted.
If there’s a major shock for the fertiliser we use to grow wheat, do consumers soon see rising prices of bread, flour and beer?
It's not just oil affected, it's critical commodities such as fertiliser disrupted by the Middle East conflict. Farmers are impacted, but what about the consumer at the checkout with rising prices of bread, flour & beer? 🌾
Read more from A/Prof @davidubilava.bsky.social @economicsusyd.bsky.social
We are live. A packed two-day programme, a great set of speakers, and a wide range of topics. Our 3rd #SCoPE workshop at @sydney.edu.au has a lot to look forward to. Register and stop by if you are in town.
sydneyscope.org
Nice coverage--and replication--of our working paper "Aid, Interrupted" by @leecrawfurd.bsky.social in a revlcent @cgdev.org blog post.
Here is the link to the current version of the paper: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
Bottomline: Abrupt aid withdrawals affect conflict not only by reducing resources but also by disrupting commitments that previously constrained violent behavior. This has implications for understanding vulnerability to donor-side shocks in aid-dependent settings.
[7/7]
Institutional capacity matters: stronger states experience weaker or no conflict response, while political corruption amplifies these effects.
[6/7]
Two mechanisms:
1. The announced aid withdrawal created a finite-horizon environment, undermining existing arrangements between state and non-state actors.
2. The termination of aid-funded programs reduced local employment, lowering the opportunity cost of conflict.
[5/7]
Main finding: Armed conflict between organized actors increased by 15% in high-aid countries during the first 3 months after the shutdown. Violence against civilians perpetrated by militias increased by up to 10% a bit later. No substantial changes in protests or riots.
[4/7]
Countries differed substantially in their pre-shutdown dependence on USAID, generating differential exposure to a common and plausibly exogenous aid shock. We apply event-study and difference-in-differences designs to monthly data from July 2024 to June 2025.
[3/7]
In February 2025, USAID disbursements fell by roughly 90% across Sub-Saharan Africa relative to the same month a year earlier. The shock was driven by U.S. domestic politics rather than recipient-country conditions, creating a rare quasi-experimental setting.
[2/7]
It has been one year since the January 2025 suspension of USAID. In our new paper (with Annabelle Tan and @ashani.bsky.social), we treat this suspension as a natural experiment and examine how foreign aid withdrawal affects conflict dynamics. A thread:
[1/7]
papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
Call for papers: The Social Conflict and Political Economy (SCoPE) workshop will be held at the University of Sydney on 31 March–1 April 2026. Please send papers (or extended abstracts) to the workshop email. Link to the call and previous programmes: sydneyscope.org
Our paper on harvest-time changes in conflict, violence, and social unrest has been assigned to a volume and issue (makes it easier to cite). It offers some valuable insights, in my opinion. Luckily, it is also open access, so feel free to check it out: doi.org/10.1177/0022...
Overall, our results offer new evidence on how local maize prices affect social unrest and explain why the same price change can have diverging effects. [9/9]
Using the same Afrobarometer survey data, we show that these effects are tied to changes in perceived well-being—especially relative well-being—in the wake of price shocks. [8/9]
We check suggested mechanisms with geo-located data from Afrobarometer surveys.
– Higher maize prices amplify concerns about political instability and ethnic tensions only where there is little maize agriculture or high production inequality.
– In maize-producing regions, the effect reverses. [7/9]
We then examine mechanisms.
– At or immediately after harvests, protests weaken—plausibly due to higher opportunity costs.
– Following (presumably) poor harvests, riots subside—likely due to less resentment and, possibly also, less to fight over. [6/9]
Some numbers:
– In locations with no maize agriculture, a 10% increase in prices reduces unrest (protests) by 7.5%;
– In areas with average maize cropland (relative to none), riots fall by 5.5%;
– In areas with high ethnic inequality in maize production, riots rise by 6.6%. [5/9]
To test this, we develop an index capturing maize production inequality across historical ethnic boundaries. Price increases raise unrest—especially riots—in areas with high inequality, but reduce it in more homogeneous areas. [4/9]
Grievances can be understood through the lens of relative deprivation: people feel worse when others around them seem better off. Commodity price changes create precisely such distributional effects—benefiting net producers and hurting consumers. [3/9]
Our baseline finding may appear to contradict the common perception but is hardly counterintuitive. Farmers’ grievances are typically linked to plummeting prices: e.g., “The government has let us down. The market price ... is very low …” (shorturl.at/NFNpG). [2/9]
Do commodity price spikes cause social unrest? They do. But when we focus on local prices of a locally produced cereal—maize—we find the relationship is negative, on average.
This is a baseline result of our new working paper with Aaron Humphreys. [1/9]
davidubilava.com/Papers/prote...
Hi everyone! We're finally on bluesky! We heard this is now where all the cool people hang out, and even though we are just an economics department, we still would like to be cool.
1/ 🚀Big Update❗❗
Last year we published @NatCities, a systematic analysis of how countries are organized around multiple urban centres. That geospatial dataset is very complex. So we just launched the City-Region Explorer🔎... an easy to use platform for analysis. 🧵
#EconSky #Geography #GISChat
We have a superb lineup of 18 speakers representing 10 universities from across four countries. Really excited about this one!