Jean-Francois Maystadt

• PhD in Economics
• Professor (Associate) at Lancaster University

While climate change is increasingly recognized as a driver of conflict risks, most research focuses on past correlations, hence limiting our ability to project future climate-related security risks. We use machine learning techniques to predict the spatiotemporal dynamics of conflict risks and estimate the human population that would be exposed to...

Identifying the impact of remittances on household members remaining behind is difficult due to selection into migration. In this paper, we exploit an unexpected embargo on Qatar, the second major destination among Nepali migrants. Using longitudinal data on about 1,500 Nepali households with migrants prior to the embargo, we assess how this shock...

On 5 June 2017, an airspace blockade was imposed on the State of Qatar by Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates (neighboring countries), and Egypt. We exploit this exogenous increase in air transportation costs toward non-blockading countries to examine the effect of increased travel distance, due to re-routing, on bilateral trade. Based on a...

The most dramatic outcomes of protracted civil conflict include increased malnutrition among children and the resulting consequences for lifelong health and prosperity. Little is known about how to mitigate the nutritional impact of conflict. Understanding the potential of social protection measures is particularly important when the risk of intens...

Following the most dramatic migration episode of the 21st century, Turkey hosted the largest number of Syrian refugees in the world. This paper assesses the impact of the arrival of Syrian refugees on the Turkish children's health, with a focus on height – a standard nutritional outcome. Accounting for the endogenous choice of immigrant location, o...

Key messages: (1) The decision to migrate is complex, driven by a wide range of context-specific push and pull factors, including economic, social and cultural, environmental, and safety factors. (2) Forced displacement — when people must leave their original place of residence — results from various triggering factors, events, and shocks. These in...

On June 5 th , 2017, an airspace blockade was imposed on the state of Qatar by Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates (neighboring countries) and Egypt. We exploit this exogenous increase in air transportation costs towards non-blockading countries to examine the effect of increased travel distance, due to rerouting , on bilateral trade. Based...

The most dramatic outcomes of protracted civil conflict include increased malnutrition among children and the resulting consequences for lifelong health and prosperity. Little is known about how to mitigate the nutritional impact of conflict. Knowing the potential of economic interventions is particularly important for post-conflict reconstruction,...

Introduction Despite considerable improvements in vaccination coverage over the last decade, half of the world’s unvaccinated and undervaccinated children are located in Africa. The role of institutional trust in explaining vaccination gaps has been highlighted in several qualitative reports but so far has only been quantified in a small number of...

The “ignored” civil war in Yemen has caused the world’s worst humanitarian crisis in recent history. Little is known about how to mitigate the detrimental consequences of such protracted violence. We use quarterly panel data to estimate the impact of armed conflict on child nutrition in Yemen and the role of unconditional cash transfers in mitigati...

The objective of this study consists in analyzing the determinants of the internal mobility of refugees in Turkey. We track down this mobility relying on geolocalized mobile phone calls data and bring these measures to a micro-founded gravity model in order to estimate the main drivers of refugee mobility across 26 regions in 2017. Our results show...

The potential links between climate and conflict are well studied, yet disagreement about the specific mechanisms and their significance for societies persists. Here, we build on assessment of the relationship between climate and organized armed conflict to define crosscutting priorities for future directions of research. They include (1) deepening...

The recent adoption of the Global Compact on Refugees formally recognizes not only the importance of supporting the nearly 26 million people who have sought asylum from conflict and persecution but also of easing the pressures on receiving areas and host countries. However, few countries may enforce the Compact out of concern over the economic or e...

Most of the world's displaced people are hosted in low-income countries. Focusing on evidence from poor countries, we review the literature on the economic consequences of hosting refugees or internally displaced people. In the short run, violence, environmental degradation, and disease propagation are major risks to the host populations. In the lo...

Our research report employs the D4R data and combines it with several other sources to study one of the multiple aspects of integration of refugees, namely the mobility of refugees across provinces in Turkey. In particular, we employ a standard gravity model to empirically estimate a series of determinants of refugee movements. These include the st...

Research findings on the relationship between climate and conflict are diverse and contested. Here we assess the current understanding of the relationship between climate and conflict, based on the structured judgments of experts from diverse disciplines. These experts agree that climate has affected organized armed conflict within countries. Howev...

Hunger and acute child malnutrition are increasingly concentrated in fragile countries and civil conflict zones. According to the United Nations, Yemen’s civil war has caused the world’s worst humanitarian crisis in recent history. We use high-frequency panel data and district fixed-effects and household fixed-effects models to estimate the impact...

We investigate whether entrepreneurs in the network of refugees – from the same country of origin – help refugees enter the labor market by hiring them. We analyze the universe of refugee cases without U.S. ties who were resettled in the United States between 2005 and 2010. We address threats to identification due to refugees sorting into specific...

This paper documents the effects of the recent civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo on mortality both in utero and during the first year of life. It instruments for conflict intensity using a mineral price index, which exploits the exogenous variation in the potential value of mineral resources generated by changes in world mineral prices...

The role of environmentally induced income variability as a determinant of migration has been studied little to none. We provide a theoretical discussion based on a ‘risk aversion channel’ and an overview of the empirical literature on this. We also extend a previous empirical study on 39 sub-Saharan African countries with yearly data from 1960 to...

This Food Policy Report explains why there is a need to place even higher priority on food security–related policies and programs in conflict-prone countries, and offers insights for policymakers regarding how to do so. Main Findings: To understand the relationship between conflict and food security, this report builds a new conceptual framework o...

We exploit a 1991–2010 Tanzanian household panel to assess the effects of the temporary refugee inflows originating from Burundi (1993) and Rwanda (1994). We find that the refugee presence has had a persistent and positive impact on the welfare of the local population. We investigate the possible channels of transmission, underscoring the importanc...

Our article contributes to the emerging micro-level strand of the literature on the link between local variations in weather shocks and conflicts by focusing on a pixel-level analysis for North and South Sudan between 1997 and 2009. Temperature anomalies are found to strongly affect the risk of conflict, whereas the risk is expected to magnify in a...

This paper documents the impact of civil wars in the Democratic Republic of Congo on infant mortality between 1997 and 2004. It adopts an instrumental variable approach to correct for the non-random timing and location of conflict. Strong and robust evidence, including mother fixed 1 effects regressions, shows that conflict significantly increases...

The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), established in 1975, provides evidence-based policy solutions to sustainably end hunger and malnutrition and reduce poverty. The Institute conducts research, communicates results, optimizes partnerships, and builds capacity to ensure sustainable food production, promote healthy food systems,...

An emerging literature shows how the mass arrival of refugees induces both short- and long-term consequences to hosting countries. The main contribution of this paper is to conduct a selective review of this literature from a food-security and resilience perspective. First, the paper identifies a number of direct and indirect food-security conseque...

Food insecurity at the national and household level not only is a consequence of conflict but can also cause and drive conflicts. This paper makes the case for an even higher priority for food security–related policies and programs in conflict‐prone countries. Such policies and programs have the potential to build resilience to conflict by not only...

A growing body of evidence shows a causal relationship between extreme weather events and civil conflict incidence at the global level. We find that this causality is also valid for droughts and local violent conflicts in a within-country setting over a short time frame in the case of Somalia. We estimate that a one standard deviation increase in d...

We estimate the impact of geo-located mining concessions on the number of conflict events recorded in the Democratic Republic of the Congo between 1997 and 2007. Instrumenting the variable of interest with historical concessions interacted with changes in international prices of minerals, we unveil an ecological fallacy: whereas concessions have no...

Climate change leads to more frequent and more intense droughts in Somalia. In a global context, weather shocks have been found to perpetuate poverty and fuel civil conflict. By relating regional and temporal variations in violent conflict outbreaks with drought incidence and severity, we show that this causality is valid also for Somalia at the lo...

Climate change leads to more frequent and more intense droughts in Somalia. In a global context, weather shocks have been found to perpetuate poverty and fuel civil conflict. By relating regional and temporal variations in violent conflict outbreaks with drought incidence and severity, we show that this causality is valid also for Somalia at the lo...

Environmental migration has been the subject of lively debate in recent years. The conundrum over why experts' global predictions of 50 million environmental refugees were not met in 2010 best captures how messages from advocacy and research can conflict with one another (Bojanowski 2011).1 In What Happened to the Climate Refugees? Atkins (2011) st...

This paper analyzes the effects of weather anomalies on migration in sub-Saharan Africa. The-oretically, we show how weather anomalies induce rural-urban migration that subsequently triggers international migration. We distinguish two transmission channels, an amenity and an economic geography channel. Empirically, based on annual, cross-country pa...

The role of migration in reducing poverty in developing countries has been investigated mainly from the perspective of migrants and their relatives. This paper exploits the time and spatial variations in the way households in the region of Kagera (Tanzania) traced between 1991 and 2004 have been affected by massive refugee inflows to assess how mig...

Since Collier and Hoeffler (1998, 2004), it has been supported that inequality, measured at national level, does not affect the risk of conflict. Such a result has been much debated in the literature. Based on a revisited theoretical framework, the purpose of the paper is to explore the role of inequality in localized conflicts. We argue that previ...

New micro-finance initiatives are emerging in countries with, however, highly developed banking and financial markets. In the North, micro-finance is considered as a new channel to solve the financing constraint of micro enterprises and to provide the means of their own development. Consequently, it leads us to explore the applicability of mechanis...