Eleonora Nillesen () (Development Economics Group, Wageningen University) Philip Verwimp () (Fund for Scientific Research (Flanders, Belgium), University of Antwerp)
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Recent literature in the political economy of civil war has pointed to the importance of (changes) in the economic environment for the understanding of conflict dynamics. Three channels, negative income shocks, the presence of exportable commodities and indiscriminate violence inflicted on one’s community are considered as drivers of conflict. This paper studies these channels with a new fifteen-year panel of community level data on Burundi whose coffee sector is intimately intertwined with the civil war. We find that indiscriminate violence inflicted at the start of the civil war (1993) continued to affect recruitment throughout the entire civil war. We also find that decreases in the producer price of coffee increases recruitment. Aiming to distinguish the resentment aspect from the opportunity aspect in low producer prices, we perform robustness tests with different specifications and with year-province rainfall shocks affecting overall agricultural income, not just coffee. Results indicate that it is the opportunity cost mechanism that drives increased recruitment.
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Paper provided by MICROCON - A Micro Level Analysis of Violent Conflict in its series Research Working Papers with number
11.
Find related papers by JEL classification: C23 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Single Equation Models; Single Variables - - - Models with Panel Data N37 - Economic History - - Labor and Consumers, Demography, Education, Income, and Wealth - - - Africa; Oceania N47 - Economic History - - Government, War, Law, and Regulation - - - Africa; Oceania
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