Access to safe drinking water is among the most important determinants of public health outcomes. We pair household-level data from Iraq together with data on armed conflict and adopt a generalized difference-in-differences approach to study the relationship between household drinking water sources and armed conflict intensity. We find that households located in conflict-affected areas are more likely to use piped water accessed at their homes or bottled water as their primary source of drinking water, but are less likely to use public water sources or tanked water delivered on trucks and carts. We explore the temporal dynamics of these adjustments as well as heterogeneity by household characteristics. We further present direct evidence that conflict-exposed households are less likely to travel to obtain water.

The purpose of this article is to record and analyse the historical circumstances in which Singapore complemented its legacy of British-type collective bargaining with the compulsory arbitration system long practiced in Australia. It notes the role of Australians (particularly one Australian industrial relations scholar at the University of Malaya) in the inception and adoption of industrial arbitration in Singapore. It seeks to identify, analyse, explain and assess the extent of the subsequent divergence of Singapore’s regulatory industrial relations regime from that of Australia since the 1960s. In doing so, it contributes to Asia-Pacific labour history and adds to the literature on international and comparative labour relations with its focus on cross-national influences on national industrial relations regimes.

Adapting agricultural systems to changes in seasonal precipitation is critical for the agricultural sector in Sri Lanka. This paper presents evidence on the adoption drivers and the welfare impacts of agricultural strategies adopted by Sri Lankan rice farmers to adapt to low rainfall conditions. We estimate the causal impact of adopting different adaptive strategies across three different dimensions: (a) sensitivity to water stress, (b) household productivity, and (c) household livelihood conditions. The results highlight important trade-offs faced by farmers between reducing vulnerability to water stress and maximizing profitability and welfare outcomes. These findings are important for informing policies to support climate adaptation among smallholders, and to build and improve the climate resilience of Sri Lanka's rice sector.

This paper investigates the organizational structure of the Xiang Army, one of the best-known regional armies in the late Qing dynasty. The army developed an organizational form to overcome problems that plagued the imperial army of the central government, namely, the poor recruitment and training of soldiers, the lack of incentives to fight in battles, and the coordination failure. This organizational structure, I argue, played a central role in the rise of the Xiang Army in the Qing dynasty.

This paper is divided into three parts. In the first one we identify the project that led the Spaniards to settle in the Far East in the last third of the sixteenth century. In the second, we analyse the resources that the Spanish Crown counted on in order to support the project. And, finally, the incentives that the latter generated to stimulate the installation in the islands of settlers that assured their continuity, at least until the last third of the eighteenth century, are also studied. The sources used are basically the accounts of the Philippine Treasury of the late sixteenth century and first half of the seventeenth century, the primitive ‘relaciones’ of the conquest (1575–1590) and the ‘crónicas’ of the early sixteenth century.