IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/iza/izadps/dp8451.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Money Can't Buy Love But Can It Buy Peace? Evidence from the EU Programme for Peace and Reconciliation

Author

Listed:
  • Brück, Tilman

    (ISDC - International Security and Development Center)

  • Ferguson, Neil T.N.

    (ISDC - International Security and Development Center)

Abstract

In 1998, the Good Friday Agreement concluded a period of violence in Northern Ireland yet the scars of the conflict remained prevalent in the political landscape. Rival communities remained divided, economic performance was poor and intercommunity tensions frequently manifested. In a bid to reinforce progress towards a peaceful and stable society, over €1bn of public money was spent between 2000 and 2006 on small-scale community and business ventures. Despite the scale of expenditure, however, little rigorous effort has been made to test the success of the programmes. Splitting Northern Ireland into 582 electoral wards, we merge individual-level on perceptions of neighbourhood quality from the British Household Panel Survey with detailed PEACE II accounts. Noting potential selection and omitted variables biases, we implement two-stage random effects models and show that neither level of spending, nor number of projects, in a region is associated with improvements in perceptions of neighbourhood quality.

Suggested Citation

  • Brück, Tilman & Ferguson, Neil T.N., 2014. "Money Can't Buy Love But Can It Buy Peace? Evidence from the EU Programme for Peace and Reconciliation," IZA Discussion Papers 8451, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    • Handle: RePEc:iza:izadps:dp8451
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://docs.iza.org/dp8451.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    The Troubles; EU Structural Fund; aid intervention; terrorism; peacebuilding; political violence; Northern Ireland; PEACE II;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D74 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Conflict; Conflict Resolution; Alliances; Revolutions
    • F35 - International Economics - - International Finance - - - Foreign Aid
    • H56 - Public Economics - - National Government Expenditures and Related Policies - - - National Security and War
    • I38 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Welfare, Well-Being, and Poverty - - - Government Programs; Provision and Effects of Welfare Programs
    • O18 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - Urban, Rural, Regional, and Transportation Analysis; Housing; Infrastructure

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:iza:izadps:dp8451. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Holger Hinte (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/izaaade.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.