Tom Pepinsky

Category: Current Affairs

  • Differences in Differences: The Gaza Withdrawal

    I recently returned from an incredibly interesting visit to Israel and Palestine. Among the many interesting things that I had a chance to learn about was the stark difference between the West Bank (governed by Fatah) and the Gaza Strip (governed by Hamas). During one meeting in Ramallah, a presenter from the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics showed us this very illuminating figure comparing gross domestic product per capita in the West Bank and Gaza.

    10015006_10100884063581294_4178632248120555894_o

    This is blurry and hard to see (and written in Arabic), but the handy website of the CBS allows me to recreate it exactly using these data, with some additional annotations.

    Rplot

    Now we’re talking.

    Immediately apparent to all the social scientists in my group was the dramatic divergence in GDPPC trends after 2005. It has always been the case that Gaza is poorer than the West Bank, but Gazan living standards become much worse after 2005. A simple diff-in-diff analysis makes this point abundantly clear.

  • Call: lm(formula = GDPPC ~ Gaza * Withdrawal, data = dat.test)

  • Coefficients

    Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)
    (Intercept) 1563.40 60.41 25.879 < 2e-16 ***
    Gaza -340.07 85.43 -3.981 0.000319 ***
    Withdrawal 345.19 90.06 3.833 0.000489 ***
    Gaza:Withdrawal -490.43 127.36 -3.851 0.000465 ***

  • — Signif. codes: 0 `***’ 0.001 `**’ 0.01 `*’ 0.05 `.’ 0.1 ` ‘ 1

    These results are consistent with at least two interpretations. The Fatah view—remember that we obtained the data from an official who almost certainly has links to Fatah—is that Fatah rules better than Hamas. An alternative view though, which some Israelis might support, is that the Israeli withdrawal is harmful for Palestinians. Because Israel is responsible for security and order in some of the populated areas of the West Bank, its presence ensures a more stable environment for economic activity than one would see without Israel, perhaps even in those places where the Palestinian authority does have full responsible for internal security and order. These data cannot adjudicate between these two interpretations. It might be interesting to see if Governorate-level data could do so by differentiating across areas of Israeli security presence.

    Something else that might not be so apparent, though, is that Gaza actually fared slightly better relative to the West Bank during the Second Intifada. Here is another simple diff-in-diff analysis.

  • Call: lm(formula = GDPPC ~ Gaza * Intifada, data = dat.test)

  • Coefficients

    Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)
    (Intercept) 1819.93 57.39 31.710 < 2e-16 ***
    Gaza -656.39 81.17 -8.087 1.3e-09 ***
    Intifada -337.31 104.78 -3.219 0.00272 **
    Gaza:Intifada 318.76 148.19 2.151 0.03826 *

  • — Signif. codes: 0 `***’ 0.001 `**’ 0.01 `*’ 0.05 `.’ 0.1 ` ‘ 1

    If you look carefully you can see that the worst of the Intifada (2000-2) saw Gazan GDPPC fall less steeply than in the West Bank, and climb more rapidly in the latter phases. I’m not sure what to make of this, except for to observe that poorer places have less to lose under conditions of political and economic turmoil.

  • Racism in a Multiethnic Country

    There is a very interesting new essay by Victor Mambor at Indoprogress entitled “Mass Media, Structural Racism, and the Legitimation of Violence in Papua.” Mambor describes the recent Indonesian media coverage of two Indonesian soldiers who were apparently held hostage briefly by an armed group in the highlands of Papua province. He notes some Indonesian press coverage indicating that the two soldiers had been “cooked” [= sudah dimasak], which implies that they had also been eaten. Apparently none of that is true.

    What I wish to highlight is the use of the term racism [= rasisme] to describe how the Indonesian press covers Papua. Indonesia is of course a multiethnic country. Yet in common parlance, at least in my experience, nearly every kind of distinction among Indonesia’s diverse population is one of ethnicity [= suku bangsa] or religion [= agama]. The exceptions are three: Westerners, Chinese, and Papuans. In the common Indonesian understanding, these are racial, not ethnic, distinctions.

    Does this matter? I think it does, both practically and for how we think about race as social scientists. Recently, a commenter on this essay objected to my use of the term “racism” to describe Papua in Indonesia, suggesting that race is uniquely American obsession. I don’t think that that is quite right. I agree that “racial categories” have no biological foundation. And it is plain that phenotypes vary less between Papua and neighboring islands than between those eastern islands and, say, Sumatra. Yet the very fact that the Papuan/non-Papuan distinction is described as a racial difference tells us something very fundamental about what it means to be Papuan in Indonesia. It calls for comparative investigation.

    Why is it, for example, that the popular West Papuan band “Black Brothers” took that name? My hunch is that such a thing would be simply impossible in Timor or Ambon (although if I’m wrong I’d love to know that). I propose that if we refuse to entertain the possibility that ethnic cleavages and racial cleavages really are distinct kinds of cleavages, and that that is not just an “American thing,” we miss something essential. Not just about Indonesia, but about the human condition.

    (For related points from Southeast Asia and further afield, see my discussions of the racialization of communal differences in Malaysia, and of the racialization of Islam in the West. And don’t forget this oldie on Indonesians in blackface on local TV.)