An Economic Approach to Analyzing Civil Wars
نویسنده
چکیده
Civil wars and conict can be understood from an economic point of view only if there is incomplete contracting. I examine such settings and rst 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 dont, 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.
منابع مشابه
Do Ethnic and Nonethnic Civil Wars Have the Same Causes?
A booming quantitative literature on large-scale political violence has identified important economic and political determinants of civil war. That literature has treated civil war as an aggregate category and has not considered if identity (ethnic/religious) wars have different causes than nonidentity wars. The author argues that this is an important distinction and that identity wars are due ...
متن کاملTwo Steps Forward and One Step Back: An Assessment of How Uneven Economic Development Affects the Number of Civil Wars
The effects of economic development are enormously important in understanding the causes of civil war and the requirements for successful post-conflict reconstruction. In recent decades we have seen an increase in the number of civil wars because of a phenomenon known as the conflict trap. I question why we see an increase in civil wars and what role unstable economic development plays in contr...
متن کاملInternational Commodity Prices, Growth, and the Outbreak of Civil War in Sub-Saharan Africa
To learn more about the effect of economic conditions on civil war, we examine whether Sub-Saharan civil wars are more likely to start following downturns in the international price of countries’ main export commodities. The data show a robust effect of commodity price downturns on the outbreak of civil wars. We also find that Sub-Saharan countries are more likely to see civil wars following ec...
متن کاملEconomic and Political Causes of Genocidal Violence: A comparison with findings on the causes of civil war
Genocide is different from civil war: it usually involves deaths on a much larger scale and targets particular groups – mostly civilians often with the aim of exterminating them. The violence is one-sided, and, fortunately, genocides are much rarer than civil wars. Although with genocide, as with civil wars, it is possible to identify underlying political and economic patterns that make genocid...
متن کاملEconomic Growth, Civil Wars, and Spatial Spillovers
The paper relies on a neoclassical growth model to empirically test for the influences of a civil war on steady-state income per capita both at home and in neighboring countries. Moreover, this model provides the basis for measuring long-run and short-run effects of civil wars on income per-capita growth in the host country and its neighbors. Evidence of significant collateral damage on economi...
متن کامل