EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Beyond divide and rule: Weak dictators, natural resources and civil conflict

Giacomo De Luca, Petros Sekeris and Juan Vargas

European Journal of Political Economy, 2018, vol. 53, issue C, 205-221

Abstract: We propose a model where weak rulers have incentives to let ethnically divided countries plunge in civil war. Allowing inter-group fighting reduces production–and hence the tax base–but enables the ruler to devote more resources to increasing the tax rate. This mechanism is increasingly salient with larger amounts of natural resources, especially if these are unequally distributed across ethnic groups. We validate the theoretical predictions using cross-country data, and show that our empirical results are robust to controlling for the usual determinants of civil war incidence, and to using various proxies for the ruler's relative weakness and for the presence of natural resources.

Keywords: Dictatorship; Civil war; Natural resources; Ethnic groups; Inequality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D74 H2 Q34 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0176268017301143
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Beyond divide and rule: weak dictators, natural resources and civil conflict (2011) Downloads
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:poleco:v:53:y:2018:i:c:p:205-221

DOI: 10.1016/j.ejpoleco.2017.09.001

Access Statistics for this article

European Journal of Political Economy is currently edited by J. De Haan, A. L. Hillman and H. W. Ursprung

More articles in European Journal of Political Economy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-31
Handle: RePEc:eee:poleco:v:53:y:2018:i:c:p:205-221