IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ags/aes025/356728.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Fertile Ground for Conflict: Evidence Revisited using Spatial First Differences

Author

Listed:
  • Emediegwu, Lotanna E.
  • Iloanugo, Uzoma
  • Animashaun, Jubril O.

Abstract

In this paper, we revisit the empirical evidence regarding the effect of variations in soil fertility on violence at local level. Recent evidence using spatial econometrics technique shows that increases in input (fertilizer) prices exacerbate income inequality and conflict, especially where soil fertility is more heterogeneous. However, when observational units are dense in physical space, they become susceptible to spatial dependence and heterogeneity. Our main contribution is methodological: we solve the foregoing issue by using local soil nutrient availability measurement to proxy soil fertility and employing spatial first differences (SFD) to investigate the effect of soil quality on local conflict. This methodology offers a framework that eliminates bias in soil quality data while accounting for spatial dependence and unobserved spatial heterogeneity. Also, we use geo-referenced data across countries within Sub-Sahara Africa (SSA) and the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) regions at a spatial resolution of (0.5 × 0.5) degrees over a more extended period (1997 to 2022) to show that soil nutrient heterogeneity magnifies conflicts.

Suggested Citation

Handle: RePEc:ags:aes025:356728
DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.356728
as

Download full text from publisher

File URL: https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/356728/files/Fertile%20Ground%20for%20Conflict%20Evidence%20Revisited%20using%20Spatial%20First%20Differences.pdf
Download Restriction: no
File URL: https://libkey.io/10.22004/ag.econ.356728?utm_source=ideas
LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
---><---

More about this item

Keywords

;
;

Statistics

Access and download statistics

Corrections

All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ags:aes025:356728. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: AgEcon Search (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/aesukea.html .

Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.