Economic shocks and civil conflict: Evidence from foreign interest rate movements

Peter Hull and Masami Imai

Journal of Development Economics, 2013, vol. 103, issue C, 77-89

Abstract: We exploit annual variation in influential foreign interest rates to identify externally-driven components of short-run income shocks in small open economies from 1971 to 2004 and explore the statistical nature of the income–civil conflict nexus. Our results show that movements in foreign interest rates have important effects on civil conflict risk through domestic economic channels. More importantly, the income–conflict relationship is found to be nonlinear – the conflict risk of ethnolinguistically fragmented countries is found to be much more sensitive to shifts in economic conditions than that of homogeneous countries. These results suggest an important mechanism by which short-term economic shocks affect the trajectory of the political and economic performance of ethnically divided states.

Keywords: Civil conflict; Open economy; Ethnolinguistic fragmentation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D74 F41 F43 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030438781300014X
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:deveco:v:103:y:2013:i:c:p:77-89

DOI: 10.1016/j.jdeveco.2013.02.001

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Development Economics is currently edited by M. R. Rosenzweig

More articles in Journal of Development Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().