Re-Evaluating the Economic Costs of Conflicts

Fonseca, Mariana Lopes da; Baskaran, Thushyanthan

doi:10.2139/ssrn.2613385

Cited by 2 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 57 publications

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“…The coefficient associated with conflicts‐related death is negative and significant. This result echoes the literature that finds a negative impact of conflicts on economic prosperity (International Monetary Fund, 2019; Lopes & Baskaran, 2015).…”

Section: Geographic‐natural Characteristics and Convergence Regimessupporting

confidence: 86%

Convergence heterogeneity at the local level in sub‐Saharan Africa

Charpe

2023

Papers in Regional Science

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This paper tests for convergence in labor productivity at the local level in 10 Sub-Saharan countries, disaggregated into 1136 administrative entities. This work combines nighttime lights data and a unique set of population censuses to produce local measures of growth, employment and sectoral shares. We find evidence of unconditional convergence across sectors in the range of 2%. However, convergence is heterogeneous and conditional on both manufacturing and services employment shares. Convergence is also associated with proximity to the main city, moderate population density, low land suitability and relatively moderate temperature. Lastly, the within effect dominates the between effect.

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Section: Geographic‐natural Characteristics and Convergence Regimessupporting

confidence: 86%

Convergence heterogeneity at the local level in sub‐Saharan Africa

Charpe

2023

Papers in Regional Science

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“…This has prompted several scholars to use nightlight information to measure the economic effects of armed conflict in contexts of low-quality GDP data (e.g. Rohner, Thoening & Zilibotti, 2013a; Lopes da Fonseca & Baskaran, 2015). However, nightlight data are not a viable alternative for our purposes as they are available only from the early 1990s on, which would restrict the application of our approach to only the most recent civil wars in our sample.…”

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confidence: 99%

The economic costs of civil war

Costalli

Moretti

Pischedda

2017

Journal of Peace Research

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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 socio-economic 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.

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Re-Evaluating the Economic Costs of Conflicts

Cited by 2 publications

References 57 publications

Convergence heterogeneity at the local level in sub‐Saharan Africa

Convergence heterogeneity at the local level in sub‐Saharan Africa

The economic costs of civil war

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