Governance and Regional Variation of Homicide Rates

2016 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-45 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liqun Cao ◽  
Yan Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Spatial Regression ◽  
Sub Saharan Africa ◽  
Development Economic ◽  
Data Sets ◽  
Asian Countries ◽  
Ceteris Paribus ◽  
Region Data ◽  
Sub Saharan ◽  
Criminological Theories ◽  
Cross National

Criminological theories of cross-national studies of homicide have underestimated the effects of quality governance of liberal democracy and region. Data sets from several sources are combined and a comprehensive model of homicide is proposed. Results of the spatial regression model, which controls for the effect of spatial autocorrelation, show that quality governance, human development, economic inequality, and ethnic heterogeneity are statistically significant in predicting homicide. In addition, regions of Latin America and non-Muslim Sub-Saharan Africa have significantly higher rates of homicides ceteris paribus while the effects of East Asian countries and Islamic societies are not statistically significant. These findings are consistent with the expectation of the new modernization and regional theories.

State Failure and Challenges to Democratization in Africa

2009 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 359-361 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Herbst
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Culture Wars ◽  
Sub Saharan Africa ◽  
Data Sets ◽  
State Institutions ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Important Approach ◽  
Game Theoretic ◽  
Sub Saharan ◽  
Cross National

Robert H. Bates's new book When Things Fell Apart seeks to make a contribution in two different areas. Explicitly, it joins a large literature on why state institutions collapsed in sub-Saharan Africa, especially why leaders drove one economy after the next into the ground. Less emphatically stated but clear enough from the book's content and its structure is an important contribution to political science's “culture wars” over the use of different types of evidence, especially the sometimes competing claims for the primacy of country knowledge, game-theoretic modeling, and large cross-national data sets. In particular, Bates uses a deductive approach, where game-theoretic approaches are married to national outcomes through a deep immersion in the literature and intuition (a concept he clearly seeks to rehabilitate) and then tested by the use of a significant and original database that is nonetheless relegated to an appendix. This is a particularly important approach because no one would accuse Bates of being at all hostile to large-scale quantitative analysis. Indeed, the significant data collection at Harvard's Africa Research Program (http://africa.gov.harvard.edu), which he helped found, is a service to the discipline.

scholarly journals Electoral Institutions and Electoral Violence in Sub-Saharan Africa

2014 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 297-320 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hanne Fjelde ◽  
Kristine Höglund
Keyword(s):  
Political Violence ◽  
Dominant Mode ◽  
Sub Saharan Africa ◽  
Electoral Institutions ◽  
Voting Rules ◽  
High Stakes ◽  
Electoral Violence ◽  
Sub Saharan ◽  
Political Groups ◽  
Cross National

Political violence remains a pervasive feature of electoral dynamics in many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, even where multiparty elections have become the dominant mode of regulating access to political power. With cross-national data on electoral violence in Sub-Saharan African elections between 1990 and 2010, this article develops and tests a theory that links the use of violent electoral tactics to the high stakes put in place by majoritarian electoral institutions. It is found that electoral violence is more likely in countries that employ majoritarian voting rules and elect fewer legislators from each district. Majoritarian institutions are, as predicted by theory, particularly likely to provoke violence where large ethno-political groups are excluded from power and significant economic inequalities exist.

Fostering Economic Development: Is External Finance Responsible for the Poor Economic Growth in Sub-Saharan Africa?

2016 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 313-347 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ehizuelen Michael Mitchell Omoruyi ◽  
Huang Meibo
Keyword(s):  
Economic Growth ◽  
Transmission Mechanism ◽  
Sub Saharan Africa ◽  
Consumption Expenditure ◽  
Ceteris Paribus ◽  
External Finance ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Sub Saharan ◽  
Positive Effect ◽  
Robust Consensus

On the question of whether external finance stimulates GDP growth, the profession offers inconclusive as well as frequent contradictory outcomes. While waiting for a robust consensus, this paper addressed directly the mechanisms through which external finance should influence economic growth. Investment was identify as the most significant transmission mechanism, and as well considers effects via funding regime consumption expenditure and import. By employing the residual generated repressors’, we accomplish a measure of the overall influence of external finance on economic growth, accounting for the influence through investment. Based on the pooled panel outcomes, a sample of twenty-five Sub-Saharan Africa economies were examine over the period of 1970–1997; the result indicates that there is a significant and positive effect of overseas assistance on economic growth, ceteris paribus. Based on average, each 1 % point upsurge in the aid/GNP ratio contributes one-quarter of 1 % point to the growth rate. Therefore, the poor economic growth in Africa should not be attributed to external finance ineffectiveness.

scholarly journals Integrating active learning and crowdsourcing into large-scale supervised landcover mapping algorithms

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephanie R Debats ◽  
Lyndon D Estes ◽  
David R Thompson ◽  
Kelly K Caylor
Keyword(s):  
Active Learning ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Learning Algorithm ◽  
Training Data ◽  
Sub Saharan Africa ◽  
Data Sets ◽  
Field Patterns ◽  
Sub Saharan ◽  
Highly Correlated ◽  
Computational Resources

Sub-Saharan Africa and other developing regions of the world are dominated by smallholder farms, which are characterized by small, heterogeneous, and often indistinct field patterns. In previous work, we developed an algorithm for mapping both smallholder and commercial agricultural fields that includes efficient extraction of a vast set of simple, highly correlated, and interdependent features, followed by a random forest classifier. In this paper, we demonstrated how active learning can be incorporated in the algorithm to create smaller, more efficient training data sets, which reduced computational resources, minimized the need for humans to hand-label data, and boosted performance. We designed a patch-based uncertainty metric to drive the active learning framework, based on the regular grid of a crowdsourcing platform, and demonstrated how subject matter experts can be replaced with fleets of crowdsourcing workers. Our active learning algorithm achieved similar performance as an algorithm trained with randomly selected data, but with 62% less data samples.

U.S. Population Policies, Development, and the Rural Poor of Africa

1982 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-67
Author(s):  
Edward Green
Keyword(s):  
World Bank ◽  
Low Income ◽  
Sub Saharan Africa ◽  
Asian Countries ◽  
Developing Regions ◽  
Slowing Down ◽  
Population Policies ◽  
Low Incomes ◽  
Current Economic Situation ◽  
Sub Saharan

A 1980 World Bank study paints a bleak picture of the current economic situation in sub-Saharan Africa, where most countries are at the bottom of the development pyramid. They have low incomes per capita, and their rates of economic growth have fallen behind Asian countries of comparable low income. Moreover, population growth in Africa is accelerating while trends in other developing regions suggest a slowing down.

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