Primary Commodity Exports and Civil War

James Fearon

Journal of Conflict Resolution, 2005, vol. 49, issue 4, 483-507

Abstract: Collier and Hoeffler reported that countries with a higher percentage of national income from primary commodity exports have been more prone to civil war, an interesting finding that has received much attention from policy makers and the media. The author shows that this result is quite fragile, even using Collier and Hoeffler’s data. Minor changes in the sample framing and the recovery of missing data undermine it. To the extent that there is an association, it is likely because oil is a major component of primary commodity exports and substantial oil production does associate with civil war risk. The author argues that oil predicts civil war risk not because it provides an easy source of rebel start-up finance but probably because oil producers have relatively low state capabilities given their level of per capita income and because oil makes state or regional control a tempting “prize.†An analysis of data on government observance of contracts and investor-perceived expropriation risk is consistent with this hypothesis.

Keywords: civil war; natural resources; oil; rebel finance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (238)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0022002705277544 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:jocore:v:49:y:2005:i:4:p:483-507

DOI: 10.1177/0022002705277544

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Conflict Resolution from Peace Science Society (International)
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().