Government & Politics Theses and Dissertations

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2775

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    THE SOCIAL IMPACT OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS: PUBLIC HEALTH, EDUCATION, AND INCOME INEQUALITY
    (2015) McDonald, Michael Kelly; Haufler, Virginia A; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    What happens to the welfare of people, especially in developing countries, when their government strengthens intellectual property rights (IPR)? Existing research provides conflicting answers. This project is one of the few to provide large-N analysis of the impact of IPR on social outcomes: specifically health, education, and inequality. Results suggest that stronger IPR are associated with better outcomes on some key indicators of health, education, and inequality, and worse outcomes on other indicators. A detailed case study suggests that the process of IPR reform, the motivations behind IPR reform, and the institutions involved in the adoption and enforcement of IPR partially determine the impact of IPR on each set of outcomes.
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    Does Foreign Aid Lead to Armed Civil Conflict? Examining Horizontal Inequalities and Ethnic Exclusion
    (2014) Kishi, Roudabeh; Wilkenfeld, Jonathan; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    The impact of aid flows and ethnic exclusion on civil conflict in Africa is explored. Ethno-politics and informal institutions dictate discriminatory spending allocations (in the form of political patronage flows) in most African states. The unequal allocation of these resources can foster grievances in excluded populations. When states gain access to non-tax revenues (i.e., foreign aid), it is often allocated in a similar fashion. When inequalities in access to resources lie along ethnic lines, the likelihood and intensity of conflict is higher as ethnicity can offer an important mobilizing source in organizing political action. Using newly-available disaggregated data to explore these relationships at the subnational-level, statistical results are found supporting this theory. Additionally, micro-level analysis of these mechanisms bolsters the statistical findings in a country-case study of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where the locations of aid projects, ethnic group settlement patterns, and civil conflict sites are mapped using geographic information systems.