The Incidence of Civil War: Theory and Evidence (original) (raw)

How much war will we see? Estimating the incidence of civil war in 161 countries (Working paper

2002

authors ’ and do not necessarily represent the World Bank or its Executive Directors. Quantitative studies of civil war have focused either on war initiation (onset) or war termination and have produced important insights into these processes. In this paper, we complement these studies by noting that equally important to finding out how wars start and how they end is to identify how much war we are likely to observe in any given period? To answer this question, we combine recent advances in the theory of civil war initiation and duration and develop the concept of war incidence, which denotes the probability of observing an event of civil war in any given period. We test the theories of war initiation and duration against this new concept using a five-year panel data-set of 161 countries. Our analysis of war incidence corroborates most of the results of earlier studies on war initiation and duration and enriches those results by highlighting the significance of socio-political varia...

The Incidence of Civil War Outbreak: Balancing Greed and Grievances

This paper assesses the relative explanatory power of the greed and grievance theses in accounting for the incidence of civil war outbreak. It will primarily explore the recent attribution of the greed theorem as the most salient causal factor and question its policy appeal. Through a case study of approaches to conflict incidence in the African continent, it will attempt to highlight the interpretative biases that have led to the overt endorsement of the greed approach and demonstrate how nuanced interpretations can balance the causal validity of grievances.

Preventing Civil Strife: An Important Role for Economic Policy

2001

Civil wars have become the dominant form of armed conflict in recent decades. This paper describes how some of the factors fueling these conflicts have changed over time and how economic policies are increasingly important in preventing them. The importance of economic policy, for example in ameliorating socio-economic disparities among different groups, has grown as a result of some recent developments, including the end of the Cold War (reducing the number of external interventions for geo-political reasons in wars); a trend towards democratization (allowing discord to rise into the open); economic reforms that have led to large distributional shifts (while leaving these equity issues to be solved by the political process); and the globalization of the world economy (increasing vulnerability and creating the potential for large distributional effects on an economy). With these developments, it has become more important that socio-economic factors do not become a reason for differe...

The economic costs of civil war: Synthetic counterfactual evidence and the effects of ethnic fractionalization

Journal of Peace Research, 2017

There is a consensus that civil wars entail enormous economic costs, but there is little systematic analysis of the determinants of their heterogeneous destructiveness. Moreover, reliably estimating these costs has proven challenging, due to the complexity of the relationship between violence and socioeconomic conditions. In this article, we study the effect of ethnic fractionalization of war-torn countries on the economic consequences of civil war. Building on an emerging literature on the relationships between ethnicity, trust, economic outcomes, and conflict processes, we argue that civil wars erode interethnic trust and highly fractionalized societies pay an especially high price, as they rely heavily on interethnic business relations. We use the synthetic control method to construct appropriate counterfactuals and measure the economic impact of civil war. Our focus is on the years of armed conflict in a sample of 20 countries for which we observe an average annual loss of local GDP per capita of 17.5%, though with remarkable variation across cases. The empirical analysis provides supporting evidence in the form of a robust positive association between ethnic fractionalization and our measures of war-induced economic costs.

How Much War Will We See? Estimating the Incidence of Civil War in 161 Countries

Policy Research Working Papers, 1999

As important as knowing how wars start and end is knowing Will We See? how much war we are likely to observe in any given Estimating the Incidence of Civil War period. In strategies for preventing civil war, political in 161 Countries liberalization should be a higher priority than economic

An economic approach to analyzing civil wars

Economics of Governance, 2008

Civil wars and conflict can be understood from an economic point of view only if there is incomplete contracting. I examine such settings and first discuss sources of incomplete contracting, from geography and ethnic and social distance to external interventions due to geopolitics or the presence of rents. Yet, since war is destructive, the contending parties might normally be expected to settle in the shadow of war. One reason that sometimes they do not, contrary to conventional wisdom, is because the shadow of the future is too long. Subsequently, using a formal model for guidance I examine some consequences of civil wars and emphasize the role hierarchical organization and rents play in determining the severity of conflict.

The Economic Legacy of Civil War

Journal of Conflict Resolution, 2013

This article positions itself among the very rare microeconomic analyses on the consequences of civil war. Up to now, most analyses on this topic are based on household surveys. The originality of the present study is that it investigates for the first time the likely predominant route by which civil conflict affects the economy, specifically through firms. The context of the study is Sierra Leone, a country that was ravaged by violent conflict from 1991 to 2002. The approach is to use geographical variations in the intensity of conflict to estimate the impact of violence on firms, on which we have data from the World Bank 2007 Employers’ Survey. The proposed theory is that during conflict, violence affects production through a form of technical regress and demand through a reduction in income. The persistent post-conflict effects are less obvious. We assume that war forces a prolonged contraction in output skills, which slows the pace of recovery. We termed this phenomenon “forgett...