The Economic Legacy of Civil War: Firm Level Evidence from Sierra Leone

Abstract

This paper positions itself among the very rare microeconomic analyses on the consequences of civil war. Up to now, most analyses on this topic are based upon 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, namely through firms. The context of the study is Sierra Leone, a country that was ravaged by a 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 the conflict, violence affects production through a form of technical regress and demand through a reduction in income. The persistent post-conflict effects are yet less obvious…/

A Model of Destructive Entrepreneurship: Insight for Conflict and Postconflict Recovery

“…As traditional attempts to support postconflict countries have not always achieved the intended results, supporting entrepreneurship offers a great deal of promise if it can be productive. Empirical research on firms in conflict is growing and is an important area of inquiry (see, for example, Collier and Duponchel [2012] and Camacho and Rodriguez [2012]). In addition, the role of informal institutions may be especially important where conflict is marked by state failure and market failures.…”

Rooted in Violence: Civil War, International Trade and the Expansion of Palm Oil in Colombia

“…As with the majority of aggregated studies, much of this new literature has analysed economic development in the context of civil war onset (e.g., Buhaug and Rød 2006;Buhaug et al 2009;Hegre, Østby and Raleigh 2009). Collier and Duponchel's (2013) study is one exception, which analyses the conflict in Sierra Leone using firm-level data. The study suggests that high intensity conflicts lead to smaller sized firms, as well as lower incomes realised by these firms.…”

Growing-up Unfortunate: War and Human Capital in Ethiopia

“…Moreover, return on investment is likely to decrease due to an immediate interruption of daily business, destruction of infrastructure, or instability caused by the war (Bruck, Naud, & Verwimp, 2013;Collier & Duponchel, 2013), while agricultural output may diminish due to a lack of supply or a disruption of the distribution of inputs.…”