The Impact of Food Prices on Conflict Revisited

Jasmien De Winne and Gert Peersman ()

No 316, HiCN Working Papers from Households in Conflict Network

Abstract: Studies that examine the impact of food prices on conflict usually assume that (all) changes in international food prices are exogenous shocks for individual countries or local areas. By isolating strictly exogenous shifts in global food commodity prices, we show that this assumption could seriously distort estimations of the impact on conflict in African regions. Specifically, we show that increases in food prices that are caused by harvest shocks outside Africa raise conflict significantly, whereas a “naive” regression of conflict on international food prices uncovers an inverse relationship. We also find that higher food prices lead to more conflict in regions with more agricultural production. Again, we document that failing to account for exogenous price changes exhibits a considerable bias in the impact. In addition, we show that the conventional approach to evaluate such effects; that is, estimations that include time fixed effects, ignores an important positive baseline effect that is common for all regions.

Keywords: conflict; food prices; instrumental variables (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C23 D74 F44 Q02 Q34 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr and nep-dev
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
https://hicn.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/HiCN-WP-316.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The Impact of Food Prices on Conflict Revisited (2021)
Working Paper: The Impact of Food Prices on Conflict Revisited (2019)
Working Paper: The Impact of Food Prices on Conflict Revisited (2019)
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:hic:wpaper:316

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in HiCN Working Papers from Households in Conflict Network
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tilman Brück () and () and () and ().