Rainfall inequality, trust and civil conflict in Nigeria

Muhammad Kabir Salihu and Andrea Guariso

No 205618510, Working Papers from Lancaster University Management School, Economics Department

Abstract: Do changes in the distribution of rainfall between ethnic groups increase the risk of armed conflicts within Nigeria? In this paper, we exploit variation in rainfall during the growing season, to study how resource inequality between ethnic groups affects the risks of violent conflicts in Nigeria. Our main results show that a one standard deviation change in between-group rainfall inequality during the growing season increases civil conflicts prevalence in Nigeria by about seven percentage points. This relationship is driven, in part, by declining social capital. Specifically, we demonstrated that an unequal distribution of rainfall between ethnic groups reinforces citizens grievances over government performance and creates mistrust between predominantly farming communities and those engaged in nomadic herding. The analysis highlights the need to develop conflict-sensitive mitigation and adaptation strategies to reduce the adverse effects of climatic shock.

Keywords: Conflict; Inequality; Rainfall; Trust; Nigeria (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D63 D74 E01 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev, nep-env, nep-mac and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/media/lancaster-univers ... casterWP2017_029.pdf (application/pdf)

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:lan:wpaper:205618510

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Lancaster University Management School, Economics Department Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Giorgio Motta ().