The Nexus Between Urbanisation and Human Empowerment: Income Group Based Findings of Bidirectional Causality

Abstract

The economic and social drivers of democratisation and the emergence and establishment of democratic institutions are longstanding themes of academic discourse. Within this broad body of literature, it has been argued that the process of urbanisation is also conducive to the emergence and consolidation of democracy through a number of different channels. Cities offer better access to education and facilitate organised public action and the demand for more democratic rule and respect of human rights. The nexus between urbanisation and human rights is the theme that is taken up in the present paper. Using a sample of 123 countries for the period 1981–2011, the paper examines empirically the association between urbanisation and human empowerment using the Cingranelli-Richards Index. In broad terms, the findings reported herein do not point to a strong nexus across all income groups. Nevertheless, there is evidence suggesting the presence of such a statistically significant positive association in specific cases.

Oil volatility index and Chinese stock markets during financial crisis: a time-varying perspective

“…More precisely, not only can we observe the causality among the covariates (by checking if the coefficients are equivalent to zero or not) but also, we can study if the causality is time-varying or constant by checking the significance of coefficients for each B-spline. Moreover, according to Ajmi et al (2015), we apply a dynamic VAR of order l = 1, M = 3 and lag = 1 for a bivariate VAR framework (Sato et al, 2007; Ajmi et al, 2015; Kollias and Tzeremes, 2019; Tzeremes, 2020).…”