Publications

    Federal COVID‐19 Response Funding for Tribal Governments: Lessons from the CARES Act
    Henson, Eric C., Megan M. Hill, Miriam R. Jorgensen, and Joseph P. Kalt. 2021. “Federal COVID‐19 Response Funding for Tribal Governments: Lessons from the CARES Act”. Read the full report Abstract

    The federal response to the COVID19 pandemic has played out in varied ways over the past several months. For Native nations, the CARES Act (i.e., the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act) has been the most prominent component of this response to date. Title V of the Act earmarked $8 billion for tribes and was allocated in two rounds, with many disbursements taking place in May and June of this year.

    This federal response has been critical for many tribes because of the lower socioeconomic starting points for their community members as compared to nonIndians. Even before the pandemic, the average income of a reservationresident Native American household was barely half that of the average U.S. household. Low average incomes, chronically high unemployment rates, and dilapidated or nonexistent infrastructure are persistent challenges for tribal communities and tribal leaders. Layering extremely high coronavirus incidence rates (and the effective closure of many tribal nations’ entire economies2) on top of these already challenging circumstances presented tribal governments with a host of new concerns. In other words, at the same time tribal governments’ primary resources were decimated (i.e., the earnings of tribal governmental gaming and nongaming enterprises dried up), the demands on tribes increased. They needed these resources to fight the pandemic and to continue to meet the needs of tribal citizens.

    Arthur N. Holcombe, June 2017

    In this paper Holcombe discusses lessons from successful poverty alleviation in Tibetan areas of China during 1998–2016. In the period between 1978 and 2015, the World Bank estimates that over 700 million people have been raised out of poverty based on a poverty line of $1.50 per capita. It also estimates that about 48 percent of residual poverty in China is located in ethnic minority areas where top-down macroeconomic policies to reduce poverty have been least effective and where strategies to target poor ethnic minority households with additional financial, technical, and other support were not successful in overcom- ing cultural and other barriers to greater income and food security.

    David Dapice, October 2016 

    Achieving sustainable peace in Myanmar requires a comprehensive effort which involves real negotiations between the army, government and remaining non-signatory armed ethnic groups. This paper makes the case that the resulting Grand Bargain will have to involve some degree of limited autonomy of states and natural resource revenue sharing. It will provide a basis for compensating armed groups on both sides for lost revenue, bringing revenues to Kachin state for development, and facilitating the NLD government’s investment in development spending for the rest of Myanmar in line with its priorities. Given the sizeable estimated total value of jade sales and the fact that, in the author’s estimate, official government collections for jade now amount to only 3% of sales, the paper examines possible modalities for taxing jade at a reasonable level and sharing these revenues in ways that makes durable progress possible. Several other key challenges to national unity are briefly addressed as well. Click here to read in Burmese version
     

    Sara Newland, July 2016 

    Often assumed to be an ethnically homogenous country, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in fact has a substantial minority population with 54 officially recognized ethnic groups that comprise close to 10 percent of the population. Integrating these diverse groups, many of which have a centuries-long history of conflict with the Han Chinese, into a unified Chinese nation-state has been a core policy challenge for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) since 1949.1 At first, these challenges were largely political and ideological. The CCP struggled to integrate minority elites, many of whom did not share a common language or culture with the overwhelmingly Han leaders of the CCP, into the party. They also sought to create political institutions that both respected local cultural practices and combined these diverse regions under a single, unified state, a challenge that the Soviet Union also had to confront.