Postgraduate research students

Abdullah Al Mahmud

Email: 3170348A@student.gla.ac.uk 

LinkedIn

ORCID iDhttps://orcid.org/0000-0003-1029-6944

Research title: Financing global peace: How international financial institutions seek to stabilise conflict-affected states

Research summary

Abdullah's research will examine the role and impact of International Financial Institutions (IFIs), mostly the International Monetary Fund (IMF), in assisting conflict-affected states or as defined by IMF, the Fragile and Conflict-affected States (FCS) by providing concessional financing to their neighbouring states. Using advanced quantitative data analysis (like large-N analysis, Spatial-X model, and shift-share instruments combining several country-level datasets of the IMF for the past 47 years starting from 1980), his research will explore "Intervention by Proxy" in the IMF programme contexts. 

Supervisors

Grants

  • In May 2025, I received the prestigious UK Research and Innovation Grants (UKRI) scholarship from the College of Social Sciences (CoSS), University of Glasgow, UK - which I will continue to receive throughout my whole PhD tenure starting from September 2025. 
  • I have also rreceived a Research grant from the CoSS for covering my expenses of attending any research confererences, and seminars as well as my other research related expenses. 
  • In January 2024, I received a research fellowship from The University of Dhaka for conducting my research on sustainable development goals and HDI index. 
  • In June 2024, I received another Economy of Tomorrow (EoT) Research Fellowship from Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung Bangladesh for conducting my research on handicraft sector market diversification. 

Additional information

  • As a corresponding author, I tried to explore the alternative indices for the HDI for 146+ countries’ cross-sectional data.
  • Since HDI does not account for the environmental costs, income inequality and gender inequality, I tried to propose an alternative method of measuring human development across the countries, and published a new index ranking based on my proposed metric.
  • This paper tried to see how the macroeconomic factors are being impacted by export basket fluctuations in Bangladesh, since Bangladesh is heavily reliant on its exports basket and the paper explored whether this basket is impacting the overall macroeconomic stability of the country.
  • In this paper (as the corresponding author), I investigated a potential measure of reducing the bribery. I tried to see whether an asymmetric measure against bribery could help reduce the bribery in a country like Bangladesh since the punishment is now symmetric for both the bribed and the briber.
  • As the corresponding author; I investigated the socio-economic profiling of the militants who were killed during the law enforcement authority’s operations across the countries. I investigated the alleged militants’ socio economic profiling from their dataset and as well as by taking some FGDs and KIIs.