IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/zbw/esprep/315363.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Illicit Natural Resource Trade and Security: Does Gold customs fraud Expand or Undermine Military Spending in Africa?

Author

Listed:
  • Banao, Fawzi

Abstract

In resource-rich African countries, the illicit trafficking of mineral resources poses a growing threat to state stability and governance. Therefore the paper investigates the effect of gold customs fraud on military spending, using a panel dataset of 50 African countries from 2000 to 2019. Employing an instrumental variable strategy, we find that higher levels of gold customs fraud are significantly associated with lower military expenditures. These findings suggest that illicit resource flows erode governments' tax mobilization and undermine their ability to respond to defense needs. The results are robust across multiple econometric specifications, including system GMM, and Jackknife estimation.

Suggested Citation

  • Banao, Fawzi, 2025. "Illicit Natural Resource Trade and Security: Does Gold customs fraud Expand or Undermine Military Spending in Africa?," EconStor Preprints 315363, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:zbw:esprep:315363
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/315363/1/MILITARIZATION-AND-BORDER-SECURITY.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Military spending; Gold customs fraud; Illicit natural resource trade;
    All these keywords.

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    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:zbw:esprep:315363. 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: ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/zbwkide.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.