A new study shows that e-cigarette vaping negatively affects skin wound healing, causing damage similar to that of traditional cigarette smoking.

Researchers, led by a team from Boston Medical Center (BMC), found exposure to both e-cigarette vaping and traditional cigarettes in experimental models resulted in increased tissue death, which delays wound healing. These findings, published in JAMA Facial Plastic Surgery, provide important information for providers on how to counsel their patients considering surgery on the negative impacts of both traditional and e-cigarettes on their wound healing progress and safety.

The adverse effects of traditional cigarette smoking on wound healing has been well established in the surgical field. Surgeons recommend that patients quit smoking for several months prior to surgery, whenever possible. However, alternative options to traditional smoking, such as electronic cigarette “vaping” are gaining popularity, and there has not yet been significant research done about whether it is a safer alternative to traditional smoking, particularly in the perioperative period.

In this study, the researchers exposed experimental models to one of the following: traditional cigarettes, electronic cigarettes, or to no cigarettes. They checked serum cotinine levels, a biomarker for exposure to tobacco smoke, in both positive control and experimental groups to ensure comparable nicotine exposure was achieved in both these groups.

The researchers then created skin flaps, which were grafted back on each of the models from which it was created, and monitored the grafts daily for viability and wound healing. After two weeks, the researchers found that the there was a statistically increased rate of tissue death on grafted flaps in groups exposed to either e-cigarettes or traditional cigarettes.

“Based on our findings, e-cigarettes are not a safe alternative to traditional cigarettes as it relates to timely wound healing,” says Jeffrey Spiegel, MD, chief of facial plastic surgery at BMC and the study’s corresponding author. “Providers, and patients, need to understand the risks of both types of smoking so that they can make the best decision to keep the patient as safe as possible before and after surgery.”

By Jeffrey Moyo

Letina Phiri waits at a bus terminus in Lusaka, the Zambian capital, as loaders carry her baggage of huge solar panels to pack on the bus.

“I will sell some of the panels as soon as I get home. Where I live, not far from Kabwe town, many people in rural communities there have started electrifying their homes with solar and I want to do the same,” 51-year-old Phiri told IDN.

Even in Zimbabwe, solar energy has started to gain ground in remote areas like Seke in the country’s Mashonaland East Province.

One of the villagers in Seke, 47-year-old Melinda Chisvoto, a mother of three, has found solar to be the panacea in the midst of the lack of energy in the area.

Chisvoto depends on solar lighting.

“At night, you find my home all alight with solar lamps and it is cheap because once I buy the solar panel and the other gadgets that work with it, I don’t need to pay any extra cost,” Chisvoto told IDN.

Besides individuals embracing solar energy, governments in Southern Africa have led the way in promoting the energy sector – giving a facelift to both hydro and solar energy in a bid to end the energy crisis in the region.

In Zambia, home to many like Phiri, the government has spearheaded a number of projects aimed at boosting energy in the Southern African nation – thanks to international development agencies that are stepping in to help the region fend off energy poverty.

Added to the rising solar power stations across the region, hydro power stations are also on the increase as even the remotest of places in Southern Africa are being connected to electricity.

As a result, development experts here like Zambia’s Peter Banda say that the Southern African region is “fast rising from its past as it fights to catch up with the rest of the world in prioritising energy development.”

The developments are taking place at a time Africa is experiencing economic and population growth, and therefore demand for energy. However, two-thirds of the people in sub-Saharan Africa still lack access to electricity

Meanwhile, Zambia, saddled with a population of approximately 15 million people, has 2,800 MW of installed electricity generation capacity, of which 85 percent is hydro-based. National access to electricity averages at 31 percent, with 67 percent of the urban and 4 percent of the rural population having access to power.

Twenty-two years ago, the government of Zambia set a goal for universal electricity access for all of its citizens by 2030, with the government declaring its commitment to develop and maintain energy infrastructure and services. In 2017, Power Africa made marked progress to support Zambia’s power sector development as it assisted the Energy Regulation Board (ERB) with development of Multi-Year Tariff Framework (MYTF) Procedures, Rules and Regulations to enable ERB to set tariffs in advance over a three-year period to allow conditional adjustments in tariff changes to be factored into the utility.

Even two years ago, Power Africa and USAID Zambia provided 2 million dollars to support the International Finance Corporation’s (IFC) Scaling Solar programme in Zambia aimed at boosting energy supplies in the Southern African nation.

More aid aimed at boosting energy in Zambia also came from the United States Trade and Development Agency (USTDA), which provided feasibility funding for two private sector developers that aimed to advance 20 MW of geothermal generation capacity in the country.

In 2017, the African Development Bank (AfDB) approved 50 million dollar framework financing for small-scale renewable energy projects in Zambia intended to finance 100MW of renewable energy projects.Meanwhile in Mozambique, for low income earners like 47-year-old Antonio Chikanda, electricity poverty has become a thing of the past despite living in a slum.

“Here in Chimoio, we have electricity for almost every home near the power line and many people are getting electricity connected to their homes,” Chikanda told IDN.

As many Mozambicans like Chikanda brag about having access to electricity, government there last year embarked on implementing a number of renewable energy projects intended to guarantee electricity for all by 2030.

In 2017, the Mozambican public Energy Fund and Galp Energia also signed a partnership protocol for the installation of photovoltaic solar systems in five rural communities in the provinces of Maputo, Sofala, Manica and Cabo Delgado budgeted at 545,000 euro.

And according to the Mozambican Ministry of Mineral Resources and Energy, more than 3.7 million Mozambicans benefited from new solar photovoltaic systems in 2005-2014, while solar energy is now reaching 201 villages, 669 schools, 623 health centres and 77 public buildings.

Two years ago, Scatec Solar and Norfund signed a power purchase agreement securing the sale of solar power over a 25-year period to the state-owned utility Electricidade de Mozambique.Norfund is Norway’s state-owned investment fund mandated to develop sustainable enterprises in developing countries like Mozambique in particular.

The project is the first large-scale solar plant to be built in Mozambique and represents an important first step in realising the country’s ambition to increase renewable power generation in its energy mix.

In Botswana, development experts there see the country more advanced in terms of power generation in the Southern African region.

“Botswana is way ahead in terms of linking electricity to its people, whether poor or rich and even rural households enjoy electricity here,” Keketso Sotho, an independent development expert based in Gaborone, the country’s capital, told IDN.

With the country domiciled within the region of the Kalahari desert where solar energy is rife, renewable energy could be a game changer in Botswana’s plans to be a net exporter of power.

As such, the Botswana government is looking into expanding the country’s energy mix by tapping into its abundant renewable energy sources, enabling its goal of becoming a regional powerhouse and major power exporter in the next few years.

At the Base Metals Beneficiation Forum in Francistown in 2015, Botswana’s Minister of Energy, Minerals and Water Resources, Kitso Mokaila, assured mining executives that the government was leaving no stone unturned in its bid to become a net power supplier.

“I am 100 percent sure that we will be a main exporter of power by 2018,” Mokaila said then.

Currently, the national power utility, Botswana Power Corporation (BPC), produces 470MW at its coal-fired Morupule B Power Plant while the country’s national power demand at the moment stands at an average of 550MW.

As it builds up its electricity base, the Namibian government has already managed to connect nine of 14 power projects to the country’s national electricity grid through its Interim Renewable Energy Feed-in Tariff project.

And the Namibian Energy Minister has gone on record saying that his government is committed to increasing the local electricity generating capacity from 400 to 600 MW and the rate of rural electrification from 34 percent to 50 percent by 2020.

Finally, in South Africa, with the election of Cyril Ramaphosa as president in early 2018, the country signed long-delayed renewable energy contracts worth 4.7 billion dollars with independent power producers.

Like fingerprints, no 3D printer is exactly the same.

That’s the takeaway from a new University at Buffalo-led study that describes what’s believed to be the first accurate method for tracing a 3D-printed object to the machine it came from.

The advancement, which the research team calls “PrinTracker,” could ultimately help law enforcement and intelligence agencies track the origin of 3D-printed guns, counterfeit products and other goods.

“3D printing has many wonderful uses, but it’s also a counterfeiter’s dream. Even more concerning, it has the potential to make firearms more readily available to people who are not allowed to possess them,” said the study’s lead author Wenyao Xu, PhD, associate professor of computer science and engineering in UB’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

The study will be presented in Toronto at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Conference on Computer and Communications Security, which runs from Oct. 15-19. It includes coauthors from Rutgers University and Northeastern University.

To understand the method, it’s helpful to know how 3D printers work. Like a common inkjet printer, 3D printers move back-and-forth while “printing” an object. Instead of ink, a nozzle discharges a filament, such as plastic, in layers until a three-dimensional object forms.

Each layer of a 3D-printed object contains tiny wrinkles — usually measured in submillimeters — called in-fill patterns. These patterns are supposed to be uniform. However, the printer’s model type, filament, nozzle size and other factors cause slight imperfections in the patterns. The result is an object that does not match its design plan.

For example, the printer is ordered to create an object with half-millimeter in-fill patterns. But the actual object has patterns that vary 5 to 10 percent from the design plan. Like a fingerprint to a person, these patterns are unique and repeatable. As a result, they can be traced back to the 3D printer.

“3D printers are built to be the same. But there are slight variations in their hardware created during the manufacturing process that lead to unique, inevitable and unchangeable patterns in every object they print,” Xu said.

To test PrinTracker, the research team created five door keys each from 14 common 3D printers — 10 fused deposition modeling (FDM) printers and four stereolithography (SLA) printers.

With a common scanner, the researchers created digital images of each key. From there, they enhanced and filtered each image, identifying elements of the in-fill pattern. They then developed an algorithm to align and calculate the variations of each key to verify the authenticity of the fingerprint.

Having created a fingerprint database of the 14 3D printers, the researchers were able to match the key to its printer 99.8 percent of the time. They ran a separate series of tests 10 months later to determine if additional use of the printers would affect PrinTracker’s ability to match objects to their machine of origin. The results were the same.

The team also ran experiments involving keys damaged in various ways to obscure their identity. PrinTracker was 92 percent accurate in these tests.

Xu likens the technology to the ability to identify the source of paper documents, a practice used by law enforcement agencies, printer companies and other organizations for decades. While the experiments did not involve counterfeit goods or firearms, Xu says PrinTracker can be used to trace any 3D-printed object to its printer.

“We’ve demonstrated that PrinTracker is an effective, robust and reliable way that law enforcement agencies, as well as businesses concerned about intellectual property, can trace the origin of 3D-printed goods,” Xu said.

Moody’s has raised Saudi Arabia’s GDP growth forecast for 2018 to 2.5 percent from 1.3 percent as it maintains a “stable outlook” for the Saudi economy.

The ratings agency also increased its 2019 GDP forecast to 2.7 percent, well above the 1.5 percent previously predicted, the Kingdom’s Ministry of Finance said.

Moody’s numbers exceed the forecasts of the Saudi Arabian government for the 2019 budget announced in September.

The Moody’s report released on Wednesday maintained the Kingdom’s A1 rating.

The agency expects higher oil production to boost the economy, but also said developments in the non-oil sector will contribute to stronger GDP growth in the medium and long-term.

Moody’s said the Saudi government deficit for the 2018 and 2019 will hover between 3.5 percent and 3.6 percent, a far cry from its previous expectations of 5.8 percent and 5.2 percent.

Moody’s commended Saudi Arabia’s reasonable control of expenditure, even in the face of higher oil revenues.

“In addition to the moderate funding requirements, the government is able to access ample sources of liquidity, from both domestic or international capital markets and financial reserves. It is unlikely to face problems in financing the fiscal deficit,” the report said.

Last week, the IMF lifted its projections for economic growth in Saudi Arabia saying the Kingdom’s economy is expected to grow by 2.2 percent in 2018 and 2.4 percent next year, raising previous projections by 0.5 percent.

Teenage girls who were maltreated as children are more likely to entertain suicidal thoughts if the relationship with their mother is poor and the degree of conflict between the two of them high.

Researchers at the University of Rochester’s Mt. Hope Family Center found that the quality of the mother-daughter relationship and their level of conflict are two direct mechanisms underlying the association between child maltreatment and suicidal thoughts during adolescence.

Their study, published in the journal Suicide and Life Threatening Behavior, included 164 socio-economically disadvantaged, depressed, adolescent girls (average age 14) and their mothers. Of the adolescents, 66.3 percent were African-American, 21.3 percent white, and 14 percent Latina.

The team, led by Mt. Hope research assistant professor Elizabeth Handley, used structural equation modeling to test three distinct mediating pathways that linked earlier maltreatment in childhood to suicidal thoughts for adolescent girls: 1) mother-daughter relationship quality, 2) mother-daughter conflict, and 3) adolescent depressive symptoms.

“Our findings suggest that disruptions to a positive mother-teen relationship are one reason why children who experienced abuse or neglect are at risk for suicide as teens,” says lead author Handley.

According to Handley, the findings highlight how important relationship-based interventions are for vulnerable youths.

The researchers assessed child maltreatment and mother-daughter relationship quality by looking at the teens’ responses to a series of questions. Mother-daughter conflict was measured by using their mothers’ answers to another questionnaire.

“We know from decades of research that a warm, nurturing, and consistent relationship between mothers and their children is critical for many aspects of healthy development. This continues to be true even in adolescence, when teens spend more time with their friends and less time at home with family,” says Handley.

Maltreatment includes emotional, physical, and sexual abuse, and emotional and physical neglect. Among the study participants 51.8% of adolescents indicated a history of at least one form of maltreatment.

As expected, the researchers found that rates of suicidal thoughts and recurrent thoughts of death were higher among teenage girls with a history of maltreatment than those without: 11.7 percent of non-maltreated, depressed adolescents indicated suicidal ideation, compared to 26.8 percent of maltreated, depressed adolescents.

Child maltreatment is associated with poorer mother-daughter relationship quality and increased mother-daughter conflict, both of which are linked with higher levels of suicidal thoughts among teenagers.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), suicide is the second leading cause of death among adolescents aged 10 to 24 in the United States (accidental death is the leading cause). Adolescent girls in general are more likely than their male counterparts to have suicidal thoughts.

Given the scientific evidence that the more severe and pervasive the suicidal thoughts, the greater the likelihood of suicide attempt, understanding the cause of suicidal thoughts is critical for effective youth suicide prevention and intervention design.

According to the Rochester researchers, relationship-based interventions are a promising approach to depression treatment for maltreated youth, such as interpersonal psychotherapy for adolescents, which focuses on the interpersonal context of depression. Attachment-based family therapy has also proven useful in reducing suicidal thoughts among teenagers by strengthening the functioning of the family and the parent-adolescent attachment relationship.

Russia’s ability to sell its S-400 air defense system to several different countries in different theaters illustrates the geopolitics of this particular system. For buyers and policymakers, it is changing the way missile systems are sold by Russia and measures how the US sees these sales from a geopolitical point of view.

Despite US sanctions on the Russian defense company Almaz-Antey, Moscow is offering or has sold the S-400 to a number of countries, including NATO member Turkey. China acquired the first S-400 system, including the command post, radar stations and launching stations, which resulted in the US State Department last month imposing sanctions on China’s Equipment Development Department, the military branch responsible for weapons and equipment, and its director, Li Shangfu, for engaging in “significant transactions” with Rosoboronexport, Russia’s main arms exporter.

The move, made possible by last year’s US congressional passage of the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA), seeks to penalize countries who purchase weapons from Russia, North Korea and Iran. Notably, China is being sanctioned for taking delivery of these systems and not for the conclusion of the sales contracts with Russia. Here, geopolitics by the Donald Trump White House is pushing Russia and China closer together.

The US is also watching closely for other S-400 sales to countries such as Algeria, Belarus, Iran and Vietnam, thus reducing the American sphere of influence and boosting Russia’s ability to arm, equip and train other countries’ air defense capabilities regardless of the theater. The key issue here is what the US will do given the defense requirements of other countries who want to continue to do defense business with Moscow. Both Turkey and, in particular, India now stand out.

Naturally, any sale of the S-400 to Turkey — which is a done deal — has made waves with American officials discussing ways in which to convince Ankara to think otherwise. These measures include pressure tactics such as the threat of sanctions. Questions about the interoperability of the system are obvious and any such sale of the missile system to either one of these countries means it will be standalone in either country’s air defense architecture.

The sale of five S-400 missile systems to India raised eyebrows, however, because the Trump administration and ultimately the US Congress gave New Delhi a pass on penalizing the country for buying the system from Russia. On July 24, the US Senate and House passed a bill that allows India to buy the Russian weapon system without the threat of American sanctions. CAATSA is apparently not set in stone and sales may be judged on a case-by-case basis.

Modifications to CAATSA’s Section 231 enables the US president to waive sales like the S-400 to protect US alliances, like the one it has with India. Importantly, Indian Defense Minister Nirmala Sitharaman made clear that CAATSA was a US law and not a UN law. Negotiations for the S-400 missiles have been ongoing for several years and predates America’s problem with Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, from New Delhi’s point of view.

Importantly, the US is India’s largest arms supplier after Russia. US firms have sold India more than $10 billion-worth of military hardware, mainly aircraft, over the last decade. The Indian Air Force operates frontline US aircraft such as the C-17 Globemaster, the C-130J Super Hercules and will soon receive Apache helicopter gunships and Chinook transport helicopters. But US policymakers worry that their aircraft’s radar signatures and transmission frequencies being exposed to the S-400 missile system will allow Russia to counter them in other potential conflict zones.

To be sure, India sees the S-400 as part of its strategy to maintain a credible deterrence along two fronts with China and Pakistan, who both have impressive military credentials. This fact means the system can see deep inside Pakistani territory and pick up aircraft as soon as they are airborne. Deployed along the eastern border with China, the missile system can easily monitor fighter jets taking off from airfields along the Tibetan highlands. India’s air defense architecture allows for the S-400 to become integrated into the top layer.

India also sees the S-400 as an answer to its shrinking fighter strength. It is retiring the Russian MiG-21, MiG-27 and MiG-29 aircraft and the last batch of Russian-Indian Su-30 MKI fighters is being produced by Hindustan Aeronautics Limited’s Nashik factory. India is entertaining a number of future fighter procurement packages, especially from France, which are to be delivered in 2021. From an Indian defense doctrine point of view, the S-400 will free up multi-role fighters to do air-to-ground missions instead of an air superiority role, all with America’s permission.

Overall, the US is applying different standards to implementing sanctions when Russian arms sales are involved. Moscow recognizes this fact and Rosoboronexport’s strategy is likely to push more sales of the S-400 and other equipment in order to test American resolve to slap sanctions on as many countries as possible. If the geopolitical game is not appreciated by all parties, this is where the US sanctions policy can backfire.

By Cornelia Meyer*

Wednesday’s meeting was supposed to be the EU summit where leaders crossed the t’s and dotted the i’s of the UK’s withdrawal agreement. The final document was then to go to the UK, the EU and the other 27 member parliaments for ratification. That would have enabled an orderly Brexit.

“Would” is the operative word here. The negotiations between UK chief negotiator Dominic Raab and his EU counterpart Michel Barnier hit a deadlock over the question of the Irish border and the backstop on Sunday. These negotiations had been touted as the event where Raab and Barnier would pull the rabbit out of the hat and things could be finalized in time for Wednesday, or at a special Brexit summit in November. It was not to be.

The stumbling block was once more Northern Ireland, where the respective red lines of the EU and the UK seem mutually exclusive.

Both sides want to ensure that there are no border controls between Ulster and the Republic, which will be difficult when the UK leaves both the single market and especially the customs union.

However, keeping the border open is important to maintain the peace and stability that was achieved in the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. That agreement ended decades of sectarian strife.

The UK proposed to remain in the customs union for goods, but not for services, which is not acceptable to the EU because, as Barnier has pointed out again and again, the EU will not allow for cherry-picking. The EU’s counterproposal was for Northern Ireland to stay in the customs union while the rest of the UK left. That would result in a hard border in the Irish Sea. It will never be acceptable to any British government to have a hard border between one of the four nations and the mainland — especially not as the votes from the hard-line Democratic Ulster Unionists (DUP) prop up Prime Minister Theresa May’s minority government in the House of Commons. Hence irresistible force meets immovable object.

This situation also puts the Irish in a very difficult situation. The economies of the North and the Republic have become highly integrated. In 2017, 34 percent of Irish exports were destined for the UK, most of them crossing the land border to the North. Ireland never voted for Brexit, yet the country’s economy may be even more heavily impacted by the UK leaving the EU than the UK itself.

European Council President Donald Tusk referred to the Ireland situation as a Gordian knot and continued to say that, unfortunately, he could not see a modern-day version of Alexander the Great to cut through it.

This left May in limbo when she attended dinner with the EU-27 on Wednesday night. May insisted that a solution could be found, one just needed to work on it. Barnier echoed her sentiment, which was quite surprising because he had quipped that he needed proposals from the UK, if everything on offer from the EU was unacceptable to their side.

The situation is tricky and European leaders are quite exasperated. We are roughly five months away from March 29, when the UK will officially exit the EU. Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite articulated EU leaders’ frustration eloquently, when she said that it seemed May was at the behest of many forces in Parliament and therefore had no clear mandate. She added that it was difficult to negotiate with people who did not know what they wanted.

Sadly, Grybauskaite has a point: Whatever proposal May brings home, she will upset somebody and she may not achieve the numbers needed to pass the EU withdrawal bill through Parliament. The EU proposal on Northern Ireland will enrage Arlene Foster’s DUP. A deal along the lines of the Chequers agreement (a compromise hammered out within the Cabinet at the prime ministerial country retreat) will enrage the Brexiteers of her party. Chequers did, after all, result in the resignation of then-Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson and then-Brexit Secretary David Davis. Labour could be her savior, but the opposition party demands that any Brexit deal should leave Britain with the same benefits as though it was staying in the single market and customs union, which is blatantly unrealistic. Labour stands ready for the prime minister to fail in order to call a general election, where it feels it would stand a good chance of winning.

It did not help the prime minister either when Raab suggested that any EU withdrawal bill would be a take-it-or-leave-it proposition when it came before Parliament. This had both Brexiteers and Remainers up in arms, as they demanded a “meaningful vote.” As former Attorney General Dominic Grieve pointed out, the “sovereignty of Parliament” would be put at risk if MPs were prevented from amending the bill.

This leaves us with the fallout from Wednesday’s bust-up. May and the EU agreed that they would be willing to extend the transition period (the time between leaving the EU and negotiating an agreement over the shape of a future relationship) for another year. This would mean that things could go on as is until March 29, 2021. It would also mean that Britain would still agree to the rules and regulations of the EU until 2021 without the opportunity to influence them. Most importantly, the EU would enter into a new budget cycle during the last year of the extension, which would have fiscal ramifications for the UK. So much for taking back control over the UK’s borders, laws and money. While the extension would be a wise move, giving both sides more time to come to an agreement, it is clearly unpalatable to the Brexiteers in May’s Tory party.

So stuck is the situation that EU leaders did not even offer a special Brexit summit in November. A senior EU ambassador in Britain said only a few days earlier that failing to offer a November summit would be outright discourteous toward the UK.

In the meantime, business still needs clarity; inward investment into the land of hope and glory is still dwindling. As Sarah Gordon pointed out in the Financial Times, the companies most affected are the six million or so small businesses who do not have the means to employ huge swaths of lawyers and consultants to help them navigate through a potential no-deal Brexit. Let us hope, for the sake of the economy and the people of the UK, that someone will be able to cut through that Gordian knot at the 11th hour. In the meantime, the risk of a no-deal Brexit increases every day.

*Cornelia Meyer is a business consultant, macro-economist and energy expert. Twitter: @MeyerResources

Developed countries imposing their own Security Sector Reform (SSR) processes onto nations recovering from war often rely on entrenched colonial attitudes with no guarantee of success.

Research led by the University of Kent specifically looked at the Democratic Republic Congo (DRC) and Nepal contrasting their outcomes and examining the reasons for success or failure of SSR policies based on European templates. They question whether the systems even work in their countries of origin where statistics show ongoing institutional racism.

SSR is a key feature of peacebuilding interventions and is usually undertaken by a state alongside national and international partners. Many programmes still aim to create a security sector following a European template, without sufficiently acknowledging that this might not work in countries outside of Europe.

Dr Nadine Ansorg of Kent’s School of Politics and International Relations (POLIR) at Kent, together with Dr Julia Strasheim, Federal Chancellor Helmut Schmidt Foundation, Hamburg, found that social and political dynamics, historical and cultural details, and the involvement of other nearby countries all have to be factored into when creating meaningful SSR policies for a nation.

In DRC, the high number of rebel groups from within and outside the country posed a major obstacle to a successful demobilisation of forces. Nepal, in a contained geographical area and without involvement of neighbouring countries and other vested interests, experienced a completely different outcome to DRC.

The research highlights the need to genuinely acknowledge that SSR programmes must respond to their specific contexts. A programme that works in one country will not necessarily work in another which may explain the mixed results in peacebuilding and the co-operation and tensions within reform programmes.

Dr Ansorg said: ‘There is a strong streak of post-colonial, persistent Eurocentric concepts in international SSR programmes, by the United Nations, World Bank, and other donors. After all, the government also persistently embodies a neo-colonial attitude towards countries from the Global South, as the recent visit of British Prime Minister Theresa May to Africa showed, and not forgetting the words of former Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson on the subject.’

Americans have a unique advantage (or disadvantage, depending on how one looks at it) in experiencing their nation’s defense and foreign affairs, namely, that for the great majority such affairs take place “over there” somewhere, often in a place they can’t locate on a map and about which they know approximately nothing.

They don’t have to smell the smoke and the decomposing bodies. They don’t have to hide in holes while their homes are demolished by bombs, rockets, and artillery. Because they have so little first-hand experience, they are vulnerable to being bamboozled by what their leaders tell them about what’s going on halfway around the world.

The leaders themselves don’t know much, either, notwithstanding the great sums they expend on gathering and analyzing information. Top leaders more or less ignore this intelligence and make their decisions on more personal, immediate, and political grounds.

But they don’t need to know much in any event, because they have great power, and even if they don’t really know much about places X, Y, and Z, they can still drop bombs on those places, claim credit for protecting the American people, and hope the situation does not unravel too visibly before the next election.

This article was published by The Beacon

President Vladimir Putin’s visit to India on 4-5 October 2018 for the 19th annual bilateral summit saw the signing of a major weapons system. This served relatively well Russia’s domestic and foreign policy objectives.

By Chris Cheang*

Russia and India signed agreements in the fields of space, nuclear energy, railways and arms sales during President Vladimir Putin’s visit to India on 4-5 October 2018. It is, however, the agreement on arms sale, which called for Russia to supply India with its S-400 air defence system for US$5 billion, that is worthy of note.

Russian arms sales to India are nothing new. India has been a key purchaser of Russian and Soviet weapons for decades. According to a recent commentary by Richard Bitzinger, a Visiting Senior Fellow with the Military Transformations Programme in RSIS, India accounted for 35 per cent of all Russian arms exports from 2013-2017.

Putin’s Multi-targetted Move

However, the fact that the arms purchase was signed during President Putin’s visit and especially some two weeks after the US announced sanctions against China for purchasing the same system from Russia, is significant.

The US sanctions against China were in relation to Washington’s CAATSA (Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act) which “..provides sanctions for activities concerning transactions with Russian defence or intelligence sectors.”

CAATSA came into force in August 2017 and is aimed at North Korea, Iran and Russia. With respect to Russia, CAATSA was passed in reaction to the US’ belief that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential elections, and Russia’s annexation of the Crimea and support of the Donbass region in the Ukrainian crisis.

By securing India’s agreement to purchase the S-400, President Putin has killed the following birds with one stone (listed below not necessarily in order of merit):

Confirmed Quality of Russian Weaponry

First, it was a showcase for the continued trust and confidence of a key customer like India in Russian weapons, in the face of growing US inroads into the weapons market in India. According to Bitzinger, between 2008-2012 and 2013-2017, Indian arms purchases from the US increased by 557 per cent.

Second, it acted as a marketing tool for Russian arms industry and exports; as Bitzinger pointed out, some of the world’s largest weapons purchasers are in Asia and India is among the top weapons buyers. Russia is obviously cognisant of this fact. Apart from China, Turkey also recently purchased the defence system.

Domestic Political and Economic Considerations

Third, it was a boost to the Russian arms sector, which is a growing and important segment of Russia’s exports; its constituents are also an important base of President Putin’s domestic supporters. Moreover, Russia’s weapons industry is one of the few technology-intensive economic sectors which can be considered a world leader, according to a research paper done by Chatham House.

Foreign Policy and Geopolitical Factors

Fourth, it reflected Russia’s continued strong links with India while further weakening the West’s objective since the annexation of the Crimea, to internationally isolate Russia. This goal, in any case, was never a realistic possibility without the participation of a major power like India.

Fifth, it ensured that India’s growing links with the US would not come at the expense of its traditionally strong ties with Russia.

Sixth, it served as a signal to China that the current close Russo-China relationship would not be allowed to jeopardise Moscow’s old ties with New Delhi; in that regard, it also acted as a reassurance to India itself that Russia has not and will not forget its old friends. Selling India one of its key weapons systems is a clear message.

Finally, it assured India that while Russia continues to build its relationship with Pakistan, India’s old rival on the subcontinent, Moscow will not deny India such a sophisticated defence system which could be deployed by India in the event of hostilities with Pakistan. Moreover, China accounts for 70% of Pakistan’s arms purchases, according to Bitzinger.

That fact alone helps to explain that balancing China and Pakistan must have been one of the motivating factors for Russia’s sale of the defence system to India.

Overall, it illustrated Russia’s continued commitment to using its weapons sales to further its foreign policy objectives not only with a key and traditional partner like India, but also with Turkey, a NATO member and China which has been, like India, a major purchaser of Russian weapons.

In that regard, unlike the US, Russia has limited tools in its efforts to build relationships with key countries in the world. Using its weapons sales will therefore remain a major foreign policy instrument.

Implications for ASEAN

In ASEAN, Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia and Myanmar have been major buyers of Russian arms. It is logical to assume that Russia will remain keen on pushing its weapons sales in the region, and not necessarily just the S-400. Only time will tell whether its sale of this weapons system to India will act as a marketing boost.

Nevertheless, it will be a development which Russia’s arms companies will certainly use in their sales efforts. In reaction to the Indian purchase, President Trump was quoted as saying that India would soon “find out” what the US was prepared to do. Russian arms companies would have to assure potential buyers of major Russian weapons that they would not have to face the prospect of US sanctions. That would be a tall order.

Moreover, major Russian arms sales to an ASEAN country which is a party to the dispute in the South China Sea might not find favour with China. In the current international climate in which Russia’s relations with the US are strained, Moscow’s links with China are touted as being very close.

Still, Moscow would have to carefully consider China’s reaction to any further major weapons supplies to ASEAN claimants to the South China Sea. After all, China is certainly more vital to Russian interests in the wider Asia-Pacific region as well as globally.

*Chris Cheang is a Senior Fellow with the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. He served three tours in the Singapore Embassy in Moscow between 1994 and 2013.

Growing Western political and corporate reluctance to be associated with Saudi Arabia in the wake of the suspected killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi spotlights fundamentally different investment strategies and environments in the bulk of Asia and the oil-rich Gulf states, the continent’s most western flank.

The Khashoggi crisis highlighted the fact that much of investment in the Gulf, irrespective of whether it is domestic, Western or Chinese, comes from financial, technology and other service industries, the arms industry or Gulf governments. It is focused on services, infrastructure or enhancing the state’s capacities rather than on manufacturing, industrial development, and the nurturing of an independent private sector.

The crisis has put on display the risks Gulf governments run by adopting policies that significantly tarnish their international reputations. Technology, media, financial and other services industries as well as various European ministers and the US Treasury Secretary have cancelled, in the wake of Mr. Khashoggi’s disappearance and likely killing while visiting the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, their participation in Davos in the Desert, a high-profile investors’ conference in Riyadh later this month.

By contrast, the military industry, with US President Donald J. Trump’s encouragement, has proven so far less worried about reputational damage.

Sponsored by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who is suspected of being responsible for Mr. Khashoggi’s likely murder, the conference was intended to attract investment in his Vision 2030 plan to reform and diversify the Saudi economy.

In highlighting differences in investment strategies in the Middle East and the rest of Asia, the fallout of Mr. Khashoggi’s disappearance goes beyond the parameters of a single incident. It suggests that foreign investment must be embedded in broader social and economic policies as well as an environment that promises stability to ensure that it is productive, contributes to sustainable growth, and benefits broad segments of the population.

In contrast to the Gulf where, with the exception of state-run airlines and DP World, Dubai’s global port operator, the bulk of investment is portfolios managed by sovereign wealth funds, trophies or investment designed to enhance a country’s international prestige and soft power, major Asian nations like China and India have used investment to lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, foster a substantial middle class, and create an industrial base.

To be sure, with small populations, Gulf states are more likely to ensure sustainability in services and oil and gas derivatives rather than in manufacturing and industry. Nonetheless, that too requires enabling policies and an education system that encourages critical thinking and the freedom to question, allow one’s mind to roam without fear of repercussion, and grants free, unfettered access to information – categories that are becoming increasingly rare in a part of the world in which freedoms are severely curtailed.

China’s US$1 trillion, infrastructure-driven Belt and Road initiative may be the Asian exception that would come closest to some of the Gulf’s soft power investments. Yet, even so, the Belt and Road initiative, designed to alleviate domestic over capacity by state-owned companies that are not beholden to shareholders’ short term demands and/or geo-political gain, contributes to productive economic growth in the People’s Republic itself.

Asian nations, moreover, have been able to manage investors’ expectations in an environment of relative political stability. By contrast, Saudi Arabia damaged confidence in its ability to reform and diversify its oil-based economy when after repeated delays it suspended indefinitely plans to list five percent of its national oil company, Saudi Arabian Oil Company or Aramco, in what would have been the world’s largest ever initial public offering.

The Khashoggi crisis and the Aramco delay followed a series of political initiatives for which there was little equivalent in the rest of Asia. These included the Saudi-United Arab Emirates military campaign in Yemen causing the world’s worst post-World War Two humanitarian crisis; the 16-month-old diplomatic and economic embargo of Qatar by Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain and Egypt;

the detention and failed effort to force Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri to resign; and the diplomatic Saudi spat with Canada in response to a tweet criticizing the kingdom’s human rights record. As a result, foreign direct investment in Saudi Arabia last year plunged to a 14-year low.

All of this is not to say that the rest of Asia does not have its own questionable policies such as Chinese claims in the South China Sea or the Pakistani-Indian feud, and questionable business practices such as China’s alleged industrial espionage. However, with the exception of China’s massive repression of Turkic Muslims in its north-western province of Xinjiang, none of these are likely to fundamentally undermine investor confidence, derail existing social and economic polices that have produced results or produce situations in which avoidance of reputational damage becomes a priority.

At the bottom line, China is no less autocratic than the Gulf states, while Hindu nationalism in India fits a global trend towards populism and illiberal democracy. Nevertheless, what differentiates much of Asia from the Gulf and accounts for its economic success are policies that ensure a relatively stable environment and are focussed on social and economic enhancement rather than primarily on regime survival. That may be the lesson for Gulf rulers.

Hindus worldwide are highly concerned regarding reports of vandalizing of Hindu temple in Regents Park, a suburb in western Sydney in New South Wales (NSW) of Australia, during the auspicious festive season of Navaratri.

Reports suggest that this vandalism at Bhartiye Mandir resulted in destruction of sacred statues and images of deities, fire damage to the interior and carpet, prayer materials thrown around, broken instruments, various other items smashed/overturned and covered with paint, etc.; causing damage of about $50,000 to this house of worship and sending the Hindu community in a state of anguish.

Hindu statesman Rajan Zed, in a statement in Nevada (USA), said that it was shocking for the worldwide Hindus to observe the hard-working, harmonious and peaceful Australian Hindu community receiving such signals of hatred and intimidation. Australian Hindus had made lot of contributions to the nation and society and continued to do so; Zed, who is President of Universal Society of Hinduism, noted.

Zed urged NSW Governor David Hurley, NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian, Cumberland Council Mayor Greg Cummings and Canterbury-Bankstown Council Mayor Khal As​four to take this issue seriously and urgently and launch swift action to put an end to such crimes and make sure that such incidents did not happen in the future.

Adequate security measures should be in place to protect the Australian Hindu population and Hurley, Berejiklian, Cummings and As​four should immediately visit the vandalized temple and meet the Hindu community in Regents Park area to reassure them; Rajan Zed indicated and added that this clearly was an attack on religious freedom of which Australia was very proud of.

Zed further said that as an interfaith gesture; Sydney Roman Catholic Archbishop Anthony Fisher, Sydney Anglican Archbishop Glenn Davies, NSW Uniting Church Moderator Simon Hansford and area leaders of other religions should strongly condemn this vandalizing and also visit the vandalized temple to show their solidarity with the dismayed Hindus.

Bhartiye Mandir, whose history goes back to 1994 and which is housed in an old Anglican church building, is “a place of worship, social gathering and celebrating cultural activities” and conducts Ram Katha every Friday. Its mantra is: ‘Samastha Loka Sukhino Bhavantu’ (Let the entire world be happy). Inderjit Rai is President, while Paras Ram Maharaj is priest.

Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s gruesome murder raises fundamental questions that go far beyond Middle Eastern geopolitics.

They go to the risks of support for autocratic regimes by democratic and authoritarian world powers, the rise of illiberal democracy in the West, increasing authoritarianism in Russia, and absolute power in China in which checks and balances are weakened or non-existent.

Mr. Khashoggi’s killing is but the latest incident of hubris that stems from the abandonment of notions of civility, tolerance and plurality; and the ability of leaders to get away with murder, literally and figuratively. It also is the product of political systems with no provisions to ensure that the power of men like Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman is restrained and checked.

Mr. Khashoggi was an advocate of the necessary checks and balances.

In his last column published in The Washington Post posthumously, Mr. Khashoggi argued that “the Arab world needs a modern version of the old transnational media so citizens can be informed about global events. More important, we need to provide a platform for Arab voices. We suffer from poverty, mismanagement and poor education. Through the creation of an independent international forum, isolated from the influence of nationalist governments spreading hate through propaganda, ordinary people in the Arab world would be able to address the structural problems their societies face.”

Mr. Khashoggi’s words were echoed by prominent journalist and political analyst Rami Khouri. “We are heading to the law of the jungle if big power and Mideast state autocracy is not held accountable,” Mr. Khouri said.

In a similar vein, a survey by the Arab Barometer survey concluded that public institutions in the Arab world, including the judiciary enjoyed little, if any, public trust.

“Part of the lack of trust comes from the disenfranchisement felt by many, especially youth and women… The lack of alternative political forces is adding to the fatigue and lack of trust in institutions. Citizens in the region struggle to find an alternative to the ruling elite that might help address the issues of ineffective governance and corruption,” said a report by the Carnegie for Endowment of Peace.

“Citizens are increasingly turning toward informal mechanisms such as protests and boycotts, and focusing more on specific issues of governance, such as service provision, particularly at the local level. Furthermore, with democracy under threat across the globe, calls for broad democratic reform have been replaced by more basic demands,” the report went on to say.

What puts the price Mr. Khashoggi paid for advocating controls of absolute power in a class of its own, is the brutality of his killing, the fact that he was murdered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul rather than, for example, by an unknown killer on a motorbike; and the increasingly difficult effort to resolve politically the crisis his death sparked.

Beyond the support by world powers of often brutal autocrats facilitated by a lack of checks and balances that in the past three decades has destroyed countries and costs the lives of millions, Mr. Khashoggi’s murder is also the product of the failure of Western leaders to seriously address the breakdown in confidence in leadership and political systems at home and abroad.

The breakdown peaked with the 2011 popular Arab revolts; simultaneous widespread protests in Latin America, the United States and Europe; and the increased popularity of anti-system, nationalist and populist politicians on both the right and the left.

Mr. Khashoggi joins the victims of extrajudicial poisoning in Britain by Russian operatives of people who like him may have been a thorn in the side of their leaders but did not pose an existential threat – not that that would justify murder or attempted murder.

He also joins the millions of casualties of failed policy and hubris caused by Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s gassing of Kurds in the 1980s and reckless 1990 invasion of Kuwait, support for Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s determination to cling to power irrespective of the human cost, the Saudi-UAE-led war in Yemen that has produced the worst humanitarian crisis since World War Two, and China’s attempt to brainwash and socially engineer what the country’s leaders see as the model Chinese citizen.

And those are just some of the most egregious instances.

No better are the multiple ways in which autocratic leaders try to ensure conformity not only through repression and suppression of a free press but also, for example, by deciding who deserves citizenship based upon whether they like their political, economic or social views rather than on birth right.

Take Bahrain whose minority Sunni Muslim regime has stripped hundreds of its nationals of their citizenship simply because it did not like their views or Turkey with its mass arrests of anyone critical of the government.

The irony is that if elections in democracies are producing illiberal leaders like US President Donald J. Trump, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Hungary’s Victor Orban, in Asia and Africa they are bring forth governments mandated to reverse Belt and Road-related, Chinese funding of projects that primarily benefit China rather than the recipient economically and pave the way for greater Chinese influencing of domestic politics as well as the export of systems that enhance unchecked state power.

In some cases, like Malaysia, they produce leaders willing to take on China’s creation of a 21^st century Orwellian surveillance state in its north-western province of Xinjiang.

It matters little what label world powers put on their support for autocrats and illiberals. The United States has long justified its policy with the need for regional stability in the greater Middle East. Russia calls it international legality while China packages is it as non-interference in the domestic affairs of others.

Said Middle East expert and former US official Charles Kestenbaum building on Mr. Khashoggi’s words: “If they (Middle Eastern states) want to compete with the globe in IT (information technology) and tech more broadly, they must encourage risk, innovation and freedom to fail. Such social and political freedom does not exist adequately in the region. The opposite in fact, authoritarian regimes repress such initiative and openness. So what do they have to compete and globally engage in the 2020’s? Nothing.”

By Tho Bishop*

Elizabeth Warren’s 2020 presidential aspirations may have ended before they began this week thanks to her team’s bizarre decision to proudly broadcast the results of a DNA test that shows she may have had a relative 10 generations removed that was of indigenous American heritage. As Senator Warren was once promoted as “Harvard Law School’s…first woman of color,” the results seem to only confirm that she misrepresented her ancestry in her past career as a law professor.

Not only has the decision been met with a blistering condemnation from the Cherokee Nation, but it has once again made her the butt of President Trump’s jokes.

Lost in the laughing at Warren’s expense however, is a larger issue exists over how American politicians continue to treat tribal sovereignty.

After all, if Warren had used her position as senator to serve as an advocate for the Cherokee Nation’s right to self-determination, her history of misrepresenting her genetic connection to the tribe would perhaps be more excusable. Say what you will about Rachel Dolezal, she at least cared enough to be an advocate for the African American community. Instead, Warren’s political record is one that has regularly promoted the continued imperial rule of Washington on land that is tribal in name only.

Though never officially serving as the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Warren has been widely credited as being the guiding force behind the creation of the agency. The CFPB was created as part of the Obama Administration’s response to the financial crisis, a powerful financial regulator that lacks the traditional checks of other executive agencies. Under the lead of former director Richard Cordray, the CFPB went to work becoming a heavy handed regulator in its fight against “unfair, deceptive and abusive” practices.

Soon, various tribal financial services businesses found themselves in the cross hairs of the enthusiastic CFPB. The result is that the agency has been described by Dr. Gavin Clarkson, a tribal finance expert, as “the most hostile federal agency towards Indian tribes since Indian Affairs was in the War Department.”

One example is a variety of short-term lending operations that various tribes started up to try to capitalize on the growth of e-commerce. In theory, tribal sovereignty should have given these ventures a competitive advantage over other US lenders who had to deal with the Washington red tape. Unfortunately Obama’s Justice Department decided these operations represented a “national security risk” and worked with the CFPB to shut them down as part of Operation Choke Point – in spite of pleas from tribal advocates that doing so would be economically devastating.

While it would be unfair to blame Elizabeth Warren for any and all actions taken by the CFPB and DOJ, she served as a primary defender of Operation Choke Point when legislative pressure mounted to end it.

Similarly, she has been the chief voice in the Senate attacking the pay day lending industry, which became a point of particular emphasis under the Cordray CFPB. This has put the Warren-Cordray camp into ongoing legal conflict with various tribes over whether federal financial regulation should apply to tribal land, leading the CFPB to sue various tribal lenders.

While the Supreme Court refused to take up the case, which could have provided a legal precedent in favor of tribal sovereignty, the suit was eventually dropped earlier this year after Mick Mulvaney took over as the CFPB’s acting head. Warren wrote a letter to Mulvaney criticizing the decision.

Warren’s indifference to the cause of tribal sovereignty appeared again this year with a vote on the Tribal Labor Sovereignty Act.

The issue here was whether tribal-owned businesses should be forced to follow federal labor laws on collective bargaining. The issue has been a major one for a number of American tribes, upset that tribal governments are subjected to labor laws that state and federal governments are exempt from.

As Jefferson Keel, the President of the National Congress of American Indians, wrote in The Hill:

Sovereignty means tribes should be allowed to make their own decisions about their own workforce policies. The truth is that many tribal nations openly welcome labor unions into the businesses that they own; others choose not to. And a growing number have designed and enforce their own labor regulations. But the NLRB ignores all of this and, instead, forces tribal governments to adhere to the NLRA. Just us. No one else. This is a plain violation of our inherent rights as sovereign nations and governments.

Unfortunately Senator Warren’s loyalty lay with labor unions over tribal sovereignty, and she joined with 41 other Senators to successfully kill a vote on the bill.

While Warren has made it easy to laugh at about “fauxocahontas” and 1/1024^th memes, her political contempt for tribal self-sovereignty is what should make her false claims to Cherokee heritage truly insulting.

Elizabeth Warren and her fellow progressives believe Native Americans are better off following her rules, rather than granting tribes the political self-determination to make such decisions for themselves. It’s a form of ideological imperialism, driven by their own belief in their moral superiority and the belief on “the right side of history.” The progressive person’s burden is to use to the power of the state to impose social justice, regulate “fairness” in the market, and impose egalitarian social norms.

This is precisely why it’s important for those who recognize the dangers of federal overreach and political centralization should take the issue of tribal sovereignty so seriously. The goal for a more civil and free society should not be the aim of some grand universal political order, but a respect for political self-determination. To that end, a respect for tribal rights is just as important as any other fight in favor of political decentralization.

About the author:
*Tho Bishop is an assistant editor for the Mises Wire

Source:
This article was published by the MISES Institute

(EurActiv) — The thorny issue of the border between Ireland and the British province of Northern Ireland could sink the negotiations on Britain’s exit from the European Union, the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier said on Friday (19 October).

“The answer is yes,” he said when asked on France Inter radio if the Irish border issue could cause the negotiations to collapse. “I believe we need a deal. I’m not yet sure we’ll get one. It is difficult, but possible.”

EU leaders warned Britain on Thursday they would offer no more concessions to break the deadlock in Brexit negotiations, but expressed confidence that a deal can be done before the country leaves the bloc next March.

A Brussels summit wrapped up without progress after British Prime Minister Theresa May offered no new proposals, beyond suggesting she could accept a longer transition period after Brexit.

May has been struggling since the 2016 referendum vote to leave the EU to reconcile the demands of her eurosceptic Conservative party with the realities of negotiating with Brussels.

Her difficulties were laid bare by the fury sparked back home at her suggestion that the post-Brexit transition period could be extended to address the Irish border issue.

Both sides have agreed there should be a legally-binding “backstop” arrangement to avoid frontier checks between British Northern Ireland and EU member Ireland if and until a new trade deal solves the issue.

This would come into effect after the transition ends — but both sides strongly disagree on its terms, and the issue is holding up the rest of the Brexit talks.

Britain crashing out of the EU without an agreement is viewed as potentially catastrophic as tariffs, customs and regulatory issues could severely disrupt trade.

By Miguel Otero-Iglesias*

Italy is the chronicle of a conflict foretold. It was evident the government of Giuseppe Conte –directed by his political patrons, Luigi Di Maio (of the Five Star Movement) and Matteo Salvini (leader of the Lega and, for many, Europe’s strongest because most feared politician)– would clash with the European Commission over the deficit levels of the new Italian public budget. Di Maio and Salvini convinced (or more likely compelled) their Minister of Finance, Giovanni Tria, to allow the deficit for 2016 to rise from a planned 1.6% of GDP to 2.4%, which was received in Brussels like a slap in the face. In response, the Commission’s President, Jean-Claude Juncker, was very firm: Italy cannot receive favoured treatment, for ‘if everyone received it, that would be the end of the euro’.

I have just returned from a few days in Italy, where the tension was plain to see. I had the opportunity to attend a meeting of young US and Italian leaders from a variety of sectors, organised by the Italy-US Council. The level of concern amongst the Italian contingent was more than noticeable. Many feared that Salvini would over-estimate his own strength in his battle with Brussels and push the country into an even more acute crisis. The ghost of the Greek tragedy of 2015 was in the air. Nevertheless, many of these young Italian executives and entrepreneurs understand that their current government has a popular mandate. If the politicians who won the elections with such a broad majority have promised a basic subsidy for the long-term unemployed, a minimum pension of €780 and a tax cut for nearly a million workers, naturally the deficit will increase.

It is possible to feel a certain sympathy for Italy’s increased spending. The country has been stagnating for decades and its public accounts are subject to the iron-fisted control of senior civil servants in the Treasury, who know that Italy’s hefty public debt (over 130% of GDP and €2.3 trillion in volume) does not leave the state much elbow room. In a sense Salvini’s government could do what Antonio Costa’s did in Portugal. When the latter came to power –also on the back of an unprecedented coalition that generated as much mistrust in Brussels as in the markets– many commentators thought his anti-austerity measures reckless. Nearly three years later, however, Portugal is bringing down its debt –despite (or perhaps as a result of) raising the salaries of civil servants–, increasing pensions, cutting unemployment and recording over 2% growth.

And this is precisely Giovanni Tria’s vision. At the last Eurogroup meeting he apparently asked his colleagues for an opportunity: a chance to apply stimulus policies to conjure up the primeval spirit needed to re-launch the economy. If the experiment works, it might even bring down Italy’s debt.

It sounds reasonable, but the snag is more the style than the substance. Were Salvini to go to Brussels singing a mellow Portuguse fado like Costa did, he would raise far greater sympathy. But, to the contrary, the Lega’s leader seems to have chosen drama and Greek tragedy. He has sought confrontation and constantly provoked the Commission and the Union’s northern members. Like Varoufakis in his day, Salvini has struck a heroic pose because he knows it arouses sympathy and attracts votes in Italy. Conversely, his pugnaciousness makes him many enemies in Brussels and elsewhere. The EU is based upon dialogue, alliances and mutual commitment and at present Italy has not a single ally in the Eurogroup, not even Malta. Salvini does not seem to grasp that today it is much more difficult to play the old ‘two-level’ game in the EU. In an ever more integrated and interconnected Europe, ranting at home is heard by the entire neighbourhood. By playing the tough guy in Italy, when in Brussels the legitimate representatives of the other European democracies will have to be tough too, precisely so as not to lose votes at home. That is how democracy works.

Italy is a club member that tends to be underestimated: certainly, it has a large public debt, but it also has a primary surplus and its debt stock has a relatively long average maturity. The country also has an almost structural current account surplus (my visit to Trentino and Alto Adige only confirmed my view of northern Italy’s powerful export strength), while its net international investment position (ie, its net foreign debt) improved from -24% in 2014 to -8% in 2018. It can therefore stand its ground for a few rounds with Brussels (which the Commission knows). However, if confrontation continues unabated, the markets will start to get jittery, the risk premium will shoot up, Italy’s banks will see their Italian public debt holdings lose market value and the country could swiftly descend into a vicious cycle like the one that overwhelmed Greece in 2015, particularly if Salvini starts to play the ‘Italy might leave the euro’ card. This seems unlikely at the moment, but it remains a powerful political weapon especially if Brussels appears before Italian public opinion as the implacable bureaucratic monster.

My advice to Salvini and Di Maio would be not to follow in Varoufakis’ wake. They should choose the Portuguese fado (even if a melancholy acceptance that heroics are something of the past) over Greek tragedy (which always ends in tears). It might not be a bad idea to take the European Commission’s most recent country report on Italy and implement some of the structural improvements it recommends. Commissioner Moscovici and the Eurogroup would then surely be more flexible and a more positive dynamic could be fostered, on balance benefitting Italy. In the final analysis, what Italy needs is more investment and higher productivity, and this cannot be achieved with higher consumption alone. In that too, Portugal can be an apt lesson on what to avoid: its productivity levels remain low.

About the author:
*Miguel Otero-Iglesias, Senior Analyst, Elcano Royal Institute | @miotei

Source: This article was published by Elcano Royal Institute. The original version in Spanish was published by Agenda Pública.

Though volumes have been written about Jesuit Missions in South America, very little is known about their long-term economic legacy. Using a novel dataset, this column argues that the 17th century Guarani Jesuit Missions had long-lasting positive effects on education and income. It also suggests cultural and occupational mechanisms that might be driving the persistent effects observed.

By Felipe Valencia Caicedo*

The aftermath of European colonialism has been an active area of research in the social sciences. While Europeans often imposed extractive institutions and created exploitative economic relationships (Acemoglu et al. 2001), they also transferred human capital, cultural values, and technological know-how (Glaeser et al. 2004,Easterly and Levine 2016), which may have led to beneficial effects in the long run. In terms of mechanisms, Dell (2010) stresses the negative effect of the mitalabour system in Latin America, while Nunn and Wantchekon (2011) document the adverse impact of African slavery through decreased trust. Less is known, however, about the way in which other colonial arrangements (moral legitimacy aside) might have led to positive outcomes in the long run.

Religion was – along with profit making and a desire for adventure – one of the main reasons for travelling to the New World. Religion also constitutes a fundamental aspect of culture. Cultural explanations of economic performance date back to Max Weber’s Protestant work ethic hypothesis (Weber 1905[2011]) and have been recently summarised by Alesina and Giuliano (2015). Modern economic research on religion has studied the impact of Protestantism in Europe (Becker and Woessmann 2009) as well as 19th century Christian missions in Africa (Nunn 2010, Wantchekon 2015, Cagé and Rueda 2016). Religious proselytising aside, missionaries brought with them a new set of skills, technologies, and values that could have been transferred to the local populations, a possibility I explore in this column.

I demonstrate here the important long-term economic benefits of Catholic missionary activity in South America (based on Valencia Caicedo 2018). I focus on missions founded by the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) during the 17th century amongst the Guarani in modern-day Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay. While religious conversion was the official aim of these Catholic missions, they also furthered human capital formation by schooling children and training adults in various crafts. The setup is unique in that Jesuits were expelled from the Americas in 1767 and never returned to the Guarani area, thus precluding any direct continuation effect.

Setup

To disentangle the national institutional effects from the human capital shock Jesuit missions supplied, I use within-country variation in missionary activity in three different countries. Hence I employ municipal-level data for five states: Corrientes and Misiones in Argentina, Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil, and Itapua and Misiones in Paraguay. Figure 1 shows the location of the Guarani Jesuit Missions in Northern Argentina, southern Brazil, and Paraguay. The area under consideration was populated by a single semi-nomadic indigenous tribe, so I can abstract from the direct effect of different pre-colonial ethnicities (Maloney and Valencia 2012, Michalopoulos and Papaioannou 2013). The early stage of development of the indigenous inhabitants at the time of contact also makes the setting unique. The Guarani area has similar geographic and weather characteristics, though I still control for these variables in the empirical analysis.

Figure 1  Locations of Guarani Jesuit Missions in Northern Argentina, southern Brazil, and Paraguay

Main findings

I find substantial positive effects of Jesuit missions on modern-day human capital and income measures, 250 years after the missionaries were expelled. In municipalities where Jesuits carried out their apostolic efforts, median years of schooling and literacy levels remain 10-15% higher. An illustration of this main finding can be seen in Figure 2, which plots literacy rates in 2010 on distance to the nearest mission. These differences in educational attainment have also translated into modern per capita incomes (or lower poverty rates) that are nearly 10% higher. Figure 3 provides an illustration of this finding using nighttime satellite data. Municipalities with historical missionary presence appear lit at night (i.e. richer). In order to rationalise these enduring educational and income differences, I examine later occupational, cultural, and behavioural channels of transmission.

Figure 2 Modern literacy and distance to nearest mission

Figure 3 Nighttime satellite images of the Guarani Jesuit missionary area

Even though I net out country effects and control for a large set of geographic and weather characteristics, Jesuit missionaries might have chosen favourable locations beyond such observable factors. Hence the positive effects encountered might be due to this initial choice and not to the missionary treatment per se. Toaddress then the potential endogeneity of missionary placement, I conduct two empirical tests. The first is a placebo test that looks at missions that were initially founded by the Jesuits but were abandoned early on (before 1659). I can thus compare places that were initially picked by missionaries with those that actually received the ‘full’ missionary treatment. I find no effect for such missions, which suggests that what mattered in the long run is what the missionaries did for centuries and not where they first settled.

Because abandonment itself might have been a voluntary choice, I also conduct a comparison with the equally successful missions established by the Franciscan order. These neighbouring Guarani Franciscan Missions were founded slightly earlier (from 1580 to 1615). The comparison is relevant in that both orders were Catholic and employed European evangelists who wanted to convert souls to Christianity. Yet Jesuits emphasised education and technical training in their conversion relative to the Franciscan mendicant Order, which mainly tended for the poor and the sick (Waldinger 2017). Contrary to the Jesuit case, I find no positive long-term impact on either education or income for Franciscan Guarani Missions. This suggests that the long-term income differences I estimate are likely to be driven by the Jesuit’s emphasis on human capital.

Extensions and mechanisms

Using historical censuses, I am able to trace the human capital effect through the intervening period between the missionary era and today. I use data from the 1895 Census of Argentina, the 1920 Census of Brazil, and the 1950 Census of Paraguay. I find that Jesuit missions had an even larger effect on human capital during intermediate historical periods and that these effects are larger for females and concentrated on local inhabitants rather than foreigners, as expected.

In terms of transmission mechanisms, I find that municipalities closer to historic missions have changed the sectoral composition of employment, moving away from agriculture and towards manufacturing and services (consistent with Botticini and Eckstein 2012). These sectoral changes also extend to occupational specialisation in more skill-intensive industries, following the categorisation of Ciccone and Papaioannou (2009). I also find that such areas differentially adopted new agricultural technologies, such as genetically modified soy varieties (as in Bustos et al. 2016).

To better understand the mechanisms at play, I further examine cultural and behavioural outcomes that can sustain the transmission of human capital from the missionary period to the present (Valencia and Voth in progress). To do so, my co-author and I conducted a household survey and lab-in-the-field experiments in Southern Paraguay and Northern Argentina. We find that respondents in former missionary areas have higher non-cognitive skills and behave more pro-socially. As can be observed in Figure 4, we find that respondents in missionary areas possess superior non-cognitive abilities, as proxied by higher ‘locus of control’ scores (Heckman et al. 2006). Using standard games from the experimental and behavioural literatures, we find that respondents in missionary areas exhibit greater altruism and more positive reciprocity, are less risk seeking, and behave more honestly. We use priming techniques from experimental psychology to investigate whether these effects are the result of greater religiosity (Norenzayan 2013, McKay et al. 2014) – which appears not to be the case.

Figure 4  Non-cognitive abilities in missionary and non-missionary areas

Conclusions

The case of the Guarani Jesuit Missions serves as a microcosm to study important economic questions. I find not only an important degree of economic persistence, in line with the recent literature, but also specific transmission mechanisms through which this persistence is enacted. Using this unique setup, I demonstrate how a historical human capital intervention can lead to substantial differences in educational and economic outcomes in the long term. I further document specific cultural and occupational mechanisms that can sustain these differences such as intergenerational knowledge transmission and non-cognitive skills. The findings support the view that historical investments in human capital can have very long-lasting consequences, altering communal culture and individual behaviour. Far from advocating historical determinism, a thorough understanding of such deep determinants of development can help to make economic policies more targeted and effective.

Editor’s note: A previous version of this column first appeared as a chapter in the Vox eBook, The Long Economic and Political Shadow of History, Volume 3, available to download here.

About the author:
* Felipe Valencia Caicedo, Assistant Professor, Vancouver School of Economics, University of British Columbia

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Air pollution in the U.S. has decreased since about 1990, and a new study conducted at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill now shows that this air quality improvement has brought substantial public health benefits. The study, published in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, found that deaths related to air pollution were nearly halved between 1990 and 2010.

The team’s analyses showed that deaths related to air pollution exposure in the U.S. decreased by about 47 percent, dropping from about 135,000 deaths in 1990 to 71,000 in 2010.

These improvements in air quality and public health in the U.S. coincided with increased federal air quality regulations, and have taken place despite increases in population, energy and electricity use, and vehicle miles traveled between 1990 and 2010.

“We’ve invested a lot of resources as a society to clean up our air,” said Jason West, professor of environmental sciences and engineering at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health and study co-author. “This study demonstrates that those changes have had a real impact with fewer people dying each year due to exposure to outdoor air pollution.”

The study was led by Yuqiang Zhang, a former postdoctoral researcher at the UNC Gillings School and at the Environmental Protection Agency and current research scientist at the Duke University Nicholas School of the Environment, and in collaboration with West and several scientists at the EPA.

This study supports results from a small number of other recent studies that also showed similar and marked reductions in air pollution-related deaths, but this study is unique in its use of a 21-year computer simulation and ability to estimate air pollution deaths each year.

Zhang, West and colleagues analyzed concentrations of two pollutants, known as PM2.5 and ozone, from a 21-year computer simulation of air pollution across the U.S. PM2.5 are very small particles suspended in the air that come from power plants, motor vehicles, industries, and some commercial and residential sources. The diameter of such small particles is less than 2.5 micrometers, which is about 3 percent of the diameter of a human hair.

They then related the declining concentrations of PM2.5 and ozone to the geographical areas in which people live and the causes of death in those areas, using data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to estimate deaths from air pollution during the period. They estimated deaths from ischemic heart disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, lung cancer and stroke related to PM2.5, and from respiratory disease for ozone.

“These health improvements likely have continued beyond 2010 as we observe that air pollutant concentrations have continued to decrease,” said Zhang.

The team plans to use other datasets to analyze air pollution deaths since 2010.

Still, despite clear improvements, air pollution remains an important public health issue in the U.S. The estimated 71,000 deaths in 2010 translates to 1 of every 35 deaths in the U.S. – that’s as many deaths as we see from all traffic accidents and all gun shootings combined.

“Even though we’ve seen some tangible success, there are still people dying, and a public health challenge remains going forward,” West said. “New federal policies curtailing air pollution regulations likely will slow the improvement in air quality or possibly make air quality worse.”

A major global report confirms gun-related homicides, suicides and accidents are falling in Australia after the introduction of anti-gun laws, and that the effect of such tough laws is similar elsewhere.

Associate Professor Richard Franklin from James Cook University in Australia joined hundreds of academics and organisations around the world to produce the report, that looked at firearm deaths outside of war zones between 1990 and 2016.

“In Australia we went from 614 firearm deaths in 1990 to 274 in 2016. That’s a fall from 3.4 deaths per 100,000 people to 1 per 100,000 in 2016,” he said.

Dr Franklin said the Australian National Firearms Agreement, enacted following the murder of 35 people in Tasmania in 1996 by a lone gunman armed with high-powered weapons, has been closely linked with declines in firearm deaths in Australia.

“We’ve seen a decline particularly in firearm suicides and an absence of mass shootings. It’s a pattern we see in South Africa and Brazil, with tougher gun laws leading to a fall in firearm deaths in those places too,” he said.

The researchers estimate that in 2016, over a quarter of a million-people died from firearm injuries. With six countries – Brazil, the United States, Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela and Guatemala – accounting for just over half of those deaths.

El Salvador recorded the worst results – its national age-standardised rate of gun deaths was 38.9 per 100,000 persons in 2016. By contrast, Singapore reported no firearms deaths that year.

Dr Franklin said that in all but one year between 1990 and 2016, the death toll from firearms used outside of war zones was higher than that within, with the majority being homicides.

“The numbers vary greatly from country to country, but globally we have seen no significant change in firearm homicide rates over this time period, though there has been a decrease in suicides, leading to a small fall in the number of firearm deaths overall.”

Dr Franklin said men are at an overwhelmingly higher risk of dying from intentional or unintentional use of firearms than women.

“Men are the most likely victims of firearms and also the most likely perpetrators of firearm violence. This opens up the possibility of specific, targeted forms of intervention that address firearm use both by and against men,” he said.

Dr Franklin said there were different patterns of firearm deaths, with homicide predominant in some countries and suicide in others, and both would require different strategies to combat them.

Background:

Globally, 64% of firearm injury deaths in 2016 were homicides and 27% were suicides. Around nine percent were accidents.

There was an annualised decrease of 0.9% in the global rate of age-standardised firearm deaths from 1990 to 2016.

Aggregate firearm injury deaths in 2016 were highest among persons aged 20 -24 years. There were an estimated 34,700 firearm-related deaths for men and 3580 for women in that age group.

Among children aged up to 14 years, there were an estimated 7220 deaths globally from firearm-related injuries in 2016.

Unintentional firearm injuries were 9.1% of the total, causing an estimated 22,900 deaths in 2016.

Globally, rates of firearm suicide decreased between 1990 and 2016 at an annualised rate of 1.6%, the fastest decreases were in the Philippines and Australia.

The researchers say that efforts to reduce the number of firearms in homes and supporting secure storage of existing firearms can reduce unintentional death, particularly for children, while also limiting immediate access to a means of harm that generally does not allow an opportunity for second thoughts.