The Ebb and Flow of Economic Distribution Amid a Long-Running Civil War: Mali

Since 2012 Mali has witnessed a metamorphosing civil war along geographic, ethnic, religious and economic lines. Distributional analysis using growth incidence curves and quantile-regression decompositions, applied to microdata of the annual 2011–2020 Modular and Permanent Household Survey, points to differences in the fortunes of conflict-affected versus comparator socio-demographic groups, between the rich and the poor, as well as across different phases in the long-running and mutating conflict. The parts of the country that were contemporaneously decimated by conflict were found to experience general reductions in incomes, particularly among the bottom income deciles, but also increases in the dispersion of incomes at the top, signaling structural shifts among the elites with respect to political allegiances and control over resources. These findings shed light on the theorized incidence of the brunt of conflict, and on strategies for alleviating suffering and safeguarding equity through tailoring of social protection, human empowerment, transparent rules-based governance, and conflict conciliation.