Mineral resources and conflicts in DRC: a case of ecological fallacy?

Abstract

We estimate the impact of geo-located mining concessions on the number of conflict events recorded in the Democratic Republic of the Congo * For helpful suggestions and comments we thank

Trade and civil conflict: Revisiting the cross‐country evidence

“…That would be the case, for instance, if these shocks influence local conflicts, which do not eventually spill into large scale civil wars. That would be consistent with evidence from Colombia (Dube and Vargas, ) and the DRC (Maystadt et al, ). However the lack of significance of the results for major conflicts could also be a product of the “rare event” bias highlighted above.…”

“…This split suggests that the conflict‐inducing impact of the export price rise is mainly driven by the price of point‐source commodities, while the effect of diffused commodities on the probability of conflict is not significant (column 1). These results are consistent with the rapacity effect hypothesis in line with much of the recent micro empirical evidence (Berman et al, ; Maystadt et al, ; Vargas, 2013).On the other hand the results provide no support to the opportunity cost or the state deterrence hypothesis of conflict.…”

“…This holds that if the state exerts control of the commodities and can tax production, a higher value may imply higher fiscal revenues for the state (Smith, ) and thus it may increase its ability to repress or buy‐off the rebels. This support for the ‘rapacity’ over the ‘state deterrence’ effect is in line with much of the recent within‐country evidence (Berman et al, ; Dube and Vargas, ; Maystadt et al, ).…”

“…The two mechanisms outlined above fail to consider that increases in export prices can be a boon also for rebel groups, who can finance their rebellion if they exert control over these commodities (or a part of them). This ‘rapacity effect’ has found considerable empirical support in the recent within‐country evidence, especially considering shocks to the prices of point‐source commodities (Berman et al, ; Maystadt et al, ; Dube and Vargas, ). On the other hand B‐B find particularly little support for the rapacity effect across countries: in their analysis prices of extractive commodities have a weakly negative effect on the risk and duration of conflict.…”

This Mine is Mine! How Minerals Fuel Conflicts in Africa

“…Given this within-country heterogeneity, aggregating information into a country-year panel may lead to noisy estimates and hence attenuation bias. Recently, some papers have used disaggregated data on natural resources and conflict for one particular country, such as Dube and Vargas (2013) on oil in Colombia; Aragón and Rud (2013) on a gold mine in Peru; Maystadt et al (2014) on minerals in the DRC; and Sanchez de la Sierra (2015) on coltan and gold in Eastern Congo. However, so far there does not exist a study of the nexus between natural resources and conflict based on a panel of disaggregated cells covering all minerals and a whole continent (Africa), as in the current paper.…”