Incentives, Opportunities, and Unintended Consequencse: An Economic Perspective on the African Charter and Canada's Foreign Policy Objective
Bibliographic record
Abstract
There is a major link between underdevelopment and the risk of conflict. Canada’s largest and most immediate security threats comes from organizations in fragile regions. These regions suffer from weak governments, dismal economies, and violent conflict. In Sub-Saharan Africa, weak governments, underdevelopment, and conflict seem to go hand-in-hand. As such, this region has a long history of instability and violent conflict, and has become a breeding grown for radical terrorist organizations. Global Affairs currently has “ten countries of focus” in Sub-Saharan Africa, and is working towards promoting economic and human development, promoting peace and security, and promoting democracy, governance, human rights and the rule of law. There are two main issues that this capstone looks to address. First, this capstone examines the effectiveness of four policies – aid, trade, military intervention, and the promotion of democratic regime change – used by Canada and the international community in fragile regions. While examining the democracy-economic development-conflict nexus, this capstone also analyzes whether Canada’s efforts to spread democratic institutions and encourage democratic regime change have helped accomplish policy objectives. Along with contributing to the debate on the effectiveness of certain policies, this capstone contributes insight on whether democracy is a cause of progress or arises as a consequence of progress. There are four main policy implications addressed in this capstone. First, there is little evidence to suggest that democracy causes economic growth and reduces the likelihood of conflict in fragile states. In fact, there is substantial evidence to suggest the contrary. Second, there is evidence suggesting that economic growth and prosperity improves democratic institutions and reduces the likelihood of conflict. It appears that democracy does not initiate growth but emerges from economic growth. As democracies mature, the institutions then foster further prosperity. Third, if Canada wishes to use democratic institutions as a policy tool, efforts should be focused on the least well off countries. Democratic regime change, however, does not appear to be an effective policy tool in low-income countries. Economic growth must be emphasized before democratic regime change is emphasized. Finally, when constructing foreign policies, policymakers must account for the various incentives and opportunities faced by numerous actors, and consider the likelihood that unintended consequences may emerge from intervention.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".