Opium for the Masses? Conflict-Induced Narcotics Production in Afghanistan

Abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Opium for the Masses? Conflict-Induced Narcotics Production in Afghanistan Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may AbstractWe show that the recent rise in Afghan opium production is caused by violent conflicts. Violence destroys roads and irrigation, crucial to alternative crops, and weakens local incentives to rebuild infrastructure and enforce law and order. Exploiting a unique data set, we show that Western hostile casualties, our proxy for conflict, have strong impact on subsequent local opium production. This proxy is shown to be exogenous to opium. We exploit the discontinuity at the end of the planting season: Conflicts have strong effects before and no effect after planting, assuring causality. Effects are strongest where government law enforcement is weak.JEL Code: D74, H56, K42, O1.

Scarcity without Leviathan: The Violent Effects of Cocaine Supply Shortages in the Mexican Drug War

“…On the empirical side, our finding that higher revenues lead to more drug-related violence in the Mexican cocaine market is consistent with results by Angrist and Kugler (2008) and Mejía and Restrepo (2013), who find that the rise of the cocaine trade spurred violence in Colombia. (Lind et al, 2014, show evidence for a causal link in the opposite direction for opium cultivation in Afghanistan.) Similar results hold for other illegal markets (García-Jimeno, 2016;Owens, 2014;Chimeli and Soares, 2017).…”

The Economics Behind the Epidemic: Afghan Opium Price and Prescription Opioids in the US

“…But the Dickey Fuller does reject the hypothesis of a unit root in the first-differenced opium price at the 99% confidence level, so we use the first-differenced series of the (log) price of opium, which is sta-tionary (as shown in Figure A.3), to identify local shocks to the time series, as a proxy for changes in the cost of the raw material for opioid-based drugs. Moreover, as observed above, opium price changes depend essentially on the violent conflicts in Afghanistan (Lind et al, 2014), precluding reverse causality problems.…”

“…Predictably, the traders' price is always a bit higher, but the two series are closely correlated and inversely related to the number of hectares under opium poppies in Afghanistan (grey bars). 21 While opium prices were very volatile during our sample period, a good part of this was due to the violent conflict in Afghanistan, as described by Lind et al (2014), which rules out the possible problem of reverse causality for our analysis.…”

Insurgency and Ivory: The Territorial Origins of Illicit Resource Extraction in Civil Conflicts

“…Such institutional erosion not only allows insurgents to intensify their own illicit resource extraction, but also facilitates rebels' connections to criminal networks that are necessary to sell products from resources, such as diamonds, gold, or narcotics processed from plants (Lind et al, 2013). Particularly important in this erosion process is the bypassing of national borders (Salehyan, 2009).…”

“…Common to most of the studies on the resource-conflict link is the assumption that if resources are present, particularly lootable resources, rebels will inevitably exploit them. Only a few studies show that insurgents vary their resource production for specific types of resources in selected countries, such as opium in Afghanistan or oil theft in Syria (Do et al, 2018; Lind et al, 2013; Ocakli & Scotch, 2017). But neither do rebels automatically extract resources when they are present, nor does this hold true for only certain types of resources in specific contexts.…”