We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 31 May 2019
In this chapter, I explore the link between government food taxes and urban unrest. I analyze an event dataset on social and political disorder in cities across the developing world matched to cross-national data on consumer food taxes between 1965 and 2009. I estimate panel regressions of the effect of food taxes on unrest. I find no simple relationship between food policy and political instability in cities. However, when the effects of food taxes are allowed to vary by political regime type, I find that higher taxes are significantly associated with greater levels of unrest under anocracy. I also estimate instrumental variables regressions that exploit exogenous variation in the composition of a country's agricultural sector to identify the causal effect of food taxes on unrest. The results of these models align with those of the panel regressions. I find that higher food taxes are significantly correlated with greater unrest, but only under anocracies, which combine a lack of democratic accountability with a relatively permissive political opportunity structure.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.
