Time: 1:00 - 2:00pm Venue: FB 4.04/08 (Francis Bancroft Building Levele 4), Mile End
Abstract: In this seminar, Dr Edwards examines the geo-political and international spatial aspects of human rights (HR), using a purpose-designed data-set. Applying empirical tools from the trade literature, he analyses the impact on a country's HR performance of geographical proximity to its neighbours. Unlike previous studies, his approach treats this as partly endogenous: one country's HR performance will affect its neighbours through a variety of potential geographical spill-over mechanisms. He starts with simple descriptive accounts, using maps and scatter plots, of the geographic history of HR performance. Using a relatively simple spatial-weighting model approach he compares each country's HR performance with what would be predicted by regression on a weighted average of its neighbours' performance (i.e. weightings depending positively on country size, and negatively upon distance), using a cross sectional dataset of one hundred and sixty countries. He uses measures of population size, distance between countries, the existence of land borders, the prevalence of war or ethnic conflict to test the general hypothesis that there may be positive spill-overs between neighbours' human rights performance. This is then extended to derive measures of HR performance relative to economic, social and spatial factors, and to estimate cross-border reaction functions in terms of HR.
All are welcome.
This seminar is part of the 'Financial, Economic and Accounting Studies (FEAST)' lunch-time seminar series. For further information, please see http://www.busman.qmul.ac.uk/newsandevents/seminars/44689.html or contact Dr Sushanta Mallick s.k.mallick@qmul.ac.uk .