Phoebe Ishak is a postdoctoral researcher at Aix-Marseille School of Economics (AMSE). Prior to joining AMSE, She was a postdoc at Freie Universität Berlin and the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies (JFKI). She holds a PhD in Economics from Universität Hamburg. Her primary research interests are Development Economics, Labor Economics, Gender and Political Economy. Her work is focused on the economies of developing countries especially in Africa, Latin America, and the MENA region. She has worked as a consultant for the United Nations ESCWA and IMF.
Can negative oil price shocks raise the risk of internal conflict in oil-dependent economies? Not really: as this column reports, evidence from 144 countries over the period 1991-2015 indicates that the destructive effects are mitigated when informal activities are a bigger part of the whole economy. The results imply the helpful role of the shadow economy in keeping political systems stable under rising economic pressures.