Ammunition leakage from military to civilian markets: market price evidence from Haiti, 2004–2012

ABSTRACT

The increase in the accessibility of firearms and ammunition represents a key factor of destabilization in many countries. It is also commonly associated with an escalation in intensity and organization of collective and interpersonal violence. In some cases, arms are illegally transferred via diversion from existing stores. In this article, we consider the leakage from military to civilian markets as an important source of ammunition available to civilians in Haiti. We employ a unique section-quarterly panel of ammunition prices on the Haitian civilian market over the period July 2004–July 2012. These data are combined with publicly available monthly data on authorized ammunition shipments to the country registered by the United Nations (UN) and Haitian National Police (HNP). We use a standard time-series Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) model to show that the exogenous shocks of UN- and HNP-ordered ammunition exert measurable downward pressure on civilian ammunition markets, which we calculate in terms of adjusted predictions and partial elasticities of demand. These effects constitute econometric evidence that the firewall that should in theory have separated military and civilian markets in Haiti partially broke down. We conclude with a suggestion for using this model to help estimate the specific size of the leakage.

KEYWORDS:

• Ammunition
• military-civilian leakage
• time-series OLS
• Haiti
• Caribbean

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• C22
• D40
• H56
• H57

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. See UN Security Council Resolutions 841 (1993); 861 (1993); 873 (1993); 875 (1993); 944 (1994) and 948 (1994).

2. Despite these embargoes, numerous shipments of arms and ammunition, both legal and illegal, did find their way to the country – most from the United States, the country that imposed the embargo in the first place (Muggah 2005).

3. See the EU Code of Conduct on Arms Exports, EU Common Position on Arms Exports and the EU Joint Action on Small Arms. More information available from the EU Council at: http://eeas.europa.eu/non-proliferation-and-disarmament/arms-export-control/index_en.htm.

4. A section is a fourth-tier administrative unit (below départements, arrondissements, and communes), of which there are 495 in our dataset.

5. Official homicide rates in Haiti are notoriously inaccurate, with a strong downward bias. For instance, Kolbe, Muggah, and Puccia (2012) calculate the homicide rate in Port-au-Prince in August 2011 and July 2012 at 60.9 and 76.2 per 100,000 respectively. These not only indicate a strong uptick in murders after the first half of 2011, but also imply, if accurate, that official figures are overly rosy. For instance, the World Bank reports the UNODC-calculated homicide rate for Haiti as 9.0 per 100,000. Back-calculating the implied homicide rate for all of Haiti (population 10,145,054 in 2011) that does not fall in Port-au-Prince (with a 2015 population of 987,310 living within the city limits, and a metropolitan area population of 2,618,894 (Institut Haïtien de Statistique et d’Informatique (IHSI) 2015), we arrive at a homicide rate between 1.8 and −14.4 per 100,000. The former is highly improbable, the latter nonsensical.

6. These indicators were first accessed on 12 November 2013, and again on 7 June 2018. 2013 data was used except where amended or added to.

7. NISAT records no small arms ammunition imports to Haiti in 2004.

8. Missing years within our study period included 2005 and 2006.

9. This information was obtain by Kolbe in a personal communication with Mario Andresol, then-chief of police of the HNP, 14 August 2008.

10. According to a personal communication with a DPKO official in January 2014, internal MINUSTAH records only record the nationalities of the troops and the authorized troop strength for each base for some, but not all, years of the mission. This does not reflect bases which did not have the full number of troops for which they were authorized (which was common during some years) nor does it reflect the movement of troops within the country in response to emergency or temporary stabilization or disaster response operations.

11. It should be noted that the US government routinely transferred weapons (and maybe ammunition?) to the Dominican Republic’s border patrol, some of which cannot be accounted for, during the study period. The transfers were through the excess and downsized military equipment program.