Civil war and economic growth: the case for a closer look at forms of mobilization

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the idea that the lack of robust evidence on the growth impact of civil war could partially be a consequence of considering civil war as a unified conceptual category, regardless of the ordinate of group identity invoked in mobilizing for war. To do so, we distinguish explicitly between episodes of internal conflict where contestants mobilized along the lines of ethnicity and ones where mobilization occurred along other markers of group identity. Using alternative definitions of civil war and System GMM estimation to address the endogeneity of conflict and per capita income, we obtain a negative contemporaneous impact of non-ethnic civil war on economic growth over the period 1975–2005. By contrast, the impact of ethnic war is statistically insignificant.

KEYWORDS:

• Growth
• civil war
• ethnicity
• System GMM

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• O43
• O47
• D74

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Smita Ramnarain for her thoughtful comments on an earlier draft of the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ This includes the categories internal armed conflict and internationalized internal armed conflict in the UCDP/PRIO Armed Conflict Dataset. Refer to the codebook for version 4-2014a:http://www.pcr.uu.se/research/ucdp/datasets/ucdp_prio_armed_conflict_dataset/

² We do not use the original Fearon and Laitin (2003) dataset because it ends in the year 2000 and imposes a higher fatality threshold on the identification of civil war.

³ The panel extends from 1975 to 2004 when we group the data into 3-year periods.