Does the implementation of a World Bank structural adjustment agreement (SAA) increase or decrease government respect for human rights? Neoliberal theory suggests that SAAs improve economic performance, generating better human rights practices. Critics contend that the implementation of structural adjustment conditions causes hardships and higher levels of domestic conflict, increasing the likelihood that regimes will use repression. Bivariate probit models are used to account for World Bank loan selection criteria when estimating the human rights consequences of structural adjustment. Using a global, comparative analysis for the 1981–2000 period, we examine the effects of structural adjustment on government respect for citizens' rights to freedom from torture, political imprisonment, extra‐judicial killing, and disappearances. The findings show that World Bank SAAs worsen government respect for physical integrity rights.

'Structural adjustment' has been a central part of the development strategy for the 'third world'. Loans made by the World Bank and the IMF have been conditional on developing countries pursuing rapid economic liberalization programmes as it was believed this would strengthen their economies in the long run. M. Rodwan Abouharb and David Cingranelli argue that, conversely, structural adjustment agreements usually cause increased hardship for the poor, greater civil conflict, and more repression of human rights, therefore resulting in a lower rate of economic development. Greater exposure to structural adjustment has increased the prevalence of anti-government protests, riots and rebellion. It has led to less respect for economic and social rights, physical integrity rights, and worker rights, but more respect for democratic rights. Based on these findings, the authors recommend a human rights-based approach to economic development.

Systematic data on annual infant mortality rates are of use to a variety of social science research programs in demography, economics, sociology, and political science. Infant mortality rates may be used both as a proxy measure for economic development, in lieu of energy consumption or GDP-per-capita measures, and as an indicator of the extent to which governments provide for the economic and social welfare of their citizens. Until recently, data were available for only a limited number of countries based on regional or country-level studies and time periods for years after 1950. Here, the authors introduce a new dataset reporting annual infant mortality rates for all states in the world, based on the Correlates of War state system list, between 1816 and 2002. They discuss past research programs using infant mortality rates in conflict studies and describe the dataset by exploring its geographic and temporal coverage. Next, they explain some of the limitations of the dataset as well as issues associated with the data themselves. Finally, they suggest some research areas that might benefit from the use of this dataset. This new dataset is the most comprehensive source on infant mortality rates currently available to social science researchers.

International Monetary Fund, Conditionality, Human rights, Physical integrity rights, F33, F34, F35, F53, F55, F59,

Respect for human rights represents self-imposed restraints on the behavior of a government. These limits signify both a domestic norm and a state that has decided to settle political disputes through nonviolent methods. When these governments interact in the international system, we suspect that their basic norms of behavior will remain and generate relatively peaceful interactions. We test this contention on pairs of all states from 1980 to 2001 and find that joint respect for human rights decreases the probability of conflict. This relationship is maintained even when one controls for the effect of democracy and its influence on the human rights record of states.tionally violent in resolving issues of international disagreement. 1 Respect for human rights can occur in states with distinctly different institutions. While democracies generally have better human rights records across all issue areas, there exist a significant number of nondemocracies that have policies which respect some subsample of human rights. For example, the United Arab Emirates, which scored a "0" on the POLITY democracy score for most of the 1980s and 1990s, had high levels of respect for personal integrity rights across the whole period (Cingranelli and Richards 2004). This leads to an intriguing question. Do nondemocracies that respect human rights have more peaceful relations with one another than nondemocracies with poor records? Or to broaden the question, does respecting human rights have the same conflictsuppressing effects as democratic institutions?Our analyses provide strong support for the argument that governments which respect human rights at home are less likely to become involved in violent international disputes with one another. These findings are independent of the conflict dampening impact of democratic institutions and generate policy recommendations that are clear and do not require costly attempts at regime change: a premium should