The causes of civil war

The dominant hypothesis in the literature that studies conflict is that poverty is the main cause of civil wars. The authors instead analyze the effect of institutions on civil war, controlling for income per capita. In their set up, institutions are endogenous and colonial origins affect civil wars through their legacy on institutions. Their results indicate that institutions, proxied by the protection of property rights, rule of law and the efficiency of the legal system, are a fundamental cause of civil war. In particular, an improvement in institutions from the median value in the sample to the 75th percentile is associated with a 38 percentage points'reduction in the incidence of civil wars. Moreover, once institutions are included as explaining civil wars, income does not have any effect on civil war, either directly or indirectly.Population Policies,Peace&Peacekeeping,Children and Youth,Services&Transfers to Poor,Inequality

FIGHTING AGAINST MALARIA: PREVENT WARS WHILE WAITING FOR THE "MIRACULOUS" VACCINE

The World Health Organization estimates that 300 million clinical cases of malaria occur annually and its incidence increased during the 90's. There are basically two factors behind the incidence of malaria: "geographical destiny", or ecological conditions, and social conditions, which are related with unstable populations or movements of people. In this paper we explore the influence of civil wars and refugees from wars on the incidence of malaria in the asylum countries using a large panel data. The panel structure helps to separate "geographical destiny" from other social conditions. The results of the estimation show the importance of civil wars? refugees on the increase of malaria during recent years. La Organización Mundial de la Salud estima que cada año se producen 300 millones de nuevos casos de malaria y su incidencia ha aumentado durante los años 90. Hay básicamente dos factores explicativos de la incidencia de la malaria: ¿destino geográfico¿, o condiciones ecológicas, y el contacto social, que está relacionado con movimientos de la población. En este trabajo estudiamos la influencia de las guerras civiles y los refugiados generados por dichas guerras sobre la incidencia de la malaria en los países de asilo usando datos de panel. Esta estructura ayuda a separar el ¿destino geográfico¿ de las condiciones sociales. Los resultados de la estimación muestran la importancia de los refugiados de guerras civiles sobre el incremento de la incidencia de la malaria.malaria, migraciones, condiciones ecológicas. Malaria, migrations, ecological conditions.

Ethnic polarization and the duration of civil wars

The authors analyze the relationship between ethnic polarization and the duration of civil wars. Several recent papers have argued that the uncertainty about the relative power of the contenders in a war will tend to increase its duration. In these models, uncertainty is directly related to the relative size of the contenders. The authors argue that the duration of civil wars increases the more polarized a society is. Uncertainty is not necessarily linked to the structure of the population but it could be traced back to the measurement of the size of the different groups in the society. Given a specific level of measurement error or uncertainty, more polarization implies lengthier wars. The empirical results show that ethnically polarized countries have to endure longer civil wars than ethnically less polarized societies.Social Conflict and Violence,Population Policies,Peace&Peacekeeping,Post Conflict Reintegration,Services&Transfers to Poor

- A THEORY OF RELIGIOUS CONFLICT AND ITS EFFECT ON GROWTH

This paper analyzes the role of religious conflict in the process of development of a country. We construct an index of religious polarization using data on the proportions of each religion in a country. The index of polarization is an alternative to the usual fragmentation index. We argue that for the case of religious conflict the fragmentation index is less appropriate than the polarization measure. We include the religious polarization index in a growth regression specification to determine the effect of religious conflicts on growth. The main finding is that religious conflict is an important factor in explaining economic growth and it is also an important explanation for the so called ¿Africa¿s growth tragedy¿. Moreover, religious polarization has a larger explanatory power on growth than ethnolinguistic and and religious fragmentation. Este trabajo analiza el papel de los conflictos religiosos en el desarrollo de un país. Hemos construido un índice de polarización religiosa utilizando los datos de proporción de cada religión en un país. El índice de polarización es una alternativa al habitual índice de fragmentación. Sostenemos que para el caso de conflictos religiosos, el índice de fragmentación es menos apropiado que el de polarización. Incluimos el índice de polarización religiosa en una regresión de crecimiento para determinar el efecto de los conflictos religiosos sobre el crecimiento. El resultado principal es que el conflicto religioso es un factor importante al explicar el crecimiento económico y también al explicar la llamada 'tragedia del crecimiento de África'. Además, la polarización religiosa tiene mayor poder explicativo sobre el crecimiento que la fragmentación etnolingüística y religiosa.índice de polarización religiosa, índice de fragmentación, crecimiento económico. index of religious polarization, fragmentation index, economic growth.

Ethnic polarization, potential conflict and civil wars

This paper analyzes the relationship between ethnic fractionalization, polarization, and conflict. In recent years many authors have found empirical evidence that ethnic fractionalization has a negative effect on growth. One mechanism that can explain this nexus is the effect of ethnic heterogeneity on rent-seeking activities and the increase in potential conflict, which is negative for investment. However the empirical evidence supporting the effect of ethnic fractionalization on the incidence of civil conflicts is very weak. Although ethnic fractionalization may be important for growth, we argue that the channel is not through an increase in potential ethnic conflict. We discuss the appropriateness of indices of polarization to capture conflictive dimensions. We develop a new measure of ethnic heterogeneity that satisfies the basic properties associated with the concept of polarization. The empirical section shows that this index of ethnic polarization is a significant variable in the explanation of the incidence of civil wars. This result is robust to the presence of other indicators of ethnic heterogeneity, other sources of data for the construction of the index, and other data structures.Ethnic diversity, conflict, indices of diversity

Fighting against Malaria: Prevent wars while waiting for the "miraculous" vaccine

The World Health Organization estimates that 300 million clinical cases of malaria occur annually and observed that during the 80's and part of the 90's its incidence increased. In this paper we explore the influence of refugees from civil wars on the incidence of malaria in the refugee-receiving countries. Using civil wars as an instrumental variable we show that for each 1,000 refugees there are between 2,000 and 2,700 cases of malaria in the refugee receiving country. On average 13% of the cases of malaria reported by the WHO are caused by forced migration as a consequence of civil wars.Civil wars, forced migration, economic impact

The aftermath of civil war

Using an"event-study"methodology, this paper analyzes the aftermath of civil war in a cross-section of countries. It focuses on those experiences where the end of conflict marks the beginning of a relatively lasting peace. The paper considers 41 countries involved in internal wars in the period 1960-2003. In order to provide a comprehensive evaluation of the aftermath of war, the paper considers a host of social areas represented by basic indicators of economic performance, health and education, political development, demographic trends, and conflict and security issues. For each of these indicators, the paper first compares the post- and pre-war situations and then examines their dynamic trends during the post-conflict period. The paper concludes that, even though war has devastating effects and its aftermath can be immensely difficult, when the end of war marks the beginning of lasting peace, recovery and improvement are indeed achieved.Population Policies,Peace&Peacekeeping,Post Conflict Reintegration,Services&Transfers to Poor,Social Conflict and Violence

The curse of aid

Foreign aid provides a windfall of resources to recipient countries and may result in the same rent seeking behavior as documented in the “curse of natural resources” literature. In this paper we discuss this effect and document its magnitude. Using data for 108 recipient countries in the period 1960 to 1999, we find that foreign aid has a negative impact on democracy. In particular, if the foreign aid over GDP that a country receives over a period of five years reaches the 75th percentile in the sample, then a 10-point index of democracy is reduced between 0.6 and one point, a large effect. For comparison, we also measure the effect of oil rents on political institutions. The fall in democracy if oil revenues reach the 75th percentile is smaller, (0.02). Aid is a bigger curse than oil.Foreign aid, democracy, conditionality

The aftermath of Civil War

Using an “event-study” methodology, this paper analyzes the aftermath of civil war in a cross-section of countries. It focuses on those experiences where the end of conflict marks the beginning of a relatively lasting peace. The paper considers 41 countries involved in internal wars in the period 1960-2003. In order to provide a comprehensive evaluation of the aftermath of war, the paper considers a host of social areas represented by basic indicators of economic performance, health and education, political development, demographic trends, and conflict and security issues. For each of these indicators, the paper first compares the post- and pre-war situations and then examines their dynamic trends during the post-conflict period. It conducts this analysis both in absolute and relative terms, the latter in relation to control groups of otherwise similar countries. The paper concludes that, even though war has devastating effects and its aftermath can be immensely difficult, when the end of war marks the beginning of lasting peace, recovery and improvement are indeed achieved.Civil War

Why ethnic fractionalization? Polarization, ethnic conflict and growth

This paper ia an attempt to clarify the relationship between fractionalization, polarization and conflict. The literature on the measurement of ethnic diversity has taken as given that the proper measure for heterogeneity can be calculated by using the fractionalization index. This index is widely used in industrial economics and, for empirical purposes, the ethnolinguistic fragmentation is ready available for regression exercises. Nevertheless the adequacy of a synthetic index of hetergeneity depends on the intrinsic characteristics of the heterogeneous dimension to be measured. In the case of ethnic diversity there is a very strong conflictive dimension. For this reason we argue that the measure of heterogeneity should be one of the class of polarization measures. In fact the intuition of the relationship between conflict and fractionalization do not hold for more than two groups. In contrast with the usual problem of polarization indices, which are of difficult empirical implementation without making some arbitrary choice of parameters, we show that the RQ index, proposed by Reynal-Querol (2002), is the only discrete polarization measure that satisfies the basic properties of polarization. Additionally we present a derivation of the RQ index from a simple rent seeking model. In the empirical section we show that while ethnic polarization has a positive effect on civil wars and, indirectly on growth, this effect is not present when we use ethnic fractionalization.Ethnic heterogeneity, civil wars, economic developement