International Commodity Prices, Growth and the Outbreak of Civil War in Sub‐Saharan Africa

Abstract

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 economic downturns in their main OECD export destinations.

The Democratic Window of Opportunity

“…ci is the export share of commodity i (assumed to be …xed over time) and P it is its price. For more details, see Brückner and Ciccone (2010). 21 We are grateful to Markus Brückner and Antonio Ciccone for making their data available to us.…”

“…This partial adjustment model allows us to estimate the short-run and long-run impact of riots on democratic change in a more ‡exible way. 24 We include gdp per capita growth in our regressions for three reasons. First, it is likely that ‡uctuations in recorded national income capture changes in the opportunity cost of a regime challenge, and so they might directly lead to preemptive democratization.…”

Does Security Imply Safety? On the (Lack of) Correlation Between Different Aspects of Security

“…A common motivation behind this research is that insecurity, conflict or violence are a human tragedy, making research on it intrinsically important. It is not uncommon for example, for the introduction to an article containing research on armed conflict, to start with a tally of the human costs that conflict has inflicted since the Second World War (see for example Brückner and Ciccone, 2010). This paper suggests that even if this research contributes to better knowledge on how to prevent or end armed conflict this may not translate one-on-one into improvements in technical security or individual (perceptions of) safety.…”

Climate and the slave trade

“…To the extent that current economic growth attenuates the rise of conflict (Collier and Hoeffler, 2004), we contribute to the literature that explains how history matters for modern conflict. Strong correlations between economic shocks, economic grievances, and the onset of conflict have been discussed in the literature (Brückner and Ciccone, 2010;Ciccone, 2011;Miguel et al, 2004). The proposed mechanisms for this link focus on the greater relative returns and lower costs of insurrection during periods of reduced income (Blattman and Miguel, 2010;Padró-i Miquel, 2009, 2010).…”