Arming opposition: Measuring the effect of arms transfers on internal conflict

Quentin Gallea

Cahiers de Recherches Economiques du Département d'économie from Université de Lausanne, Faculté des HEC, Département d’économie

Abstract: The main contribution of this paper is to provide the first causal estimation of the effect of weapons imports on confl icts in the recipient country for a global set of suppliers. The second main contribution is to suggest a novel approach to correct the errors with a Shift-Share (Bartik) instrument using arbitrary clustering and its implementation in STATA using the command acreg. Using small arms and light weapons country-year transfers data from 1992 to 2011, I estimate the effect of arms import on the con flict life-cycle (onset, duration, intensity and termination) and number of refugees from the recipient country. To address endogeneity issues, I am using supply shortages generated by suppliers' war involvement outside the recipient country's continent (Shift-Share instrumental variable) as exogenous negatives shocks on arms import. The two-stage least squares estimation shows that arms imports increase the onset of internal con flict, the number of internal con flicts, the percentage of battle-related deaths and the number of refugees fleeing the country. The 2SLS model predicts as well that if Europe would stop sending weapons to Africa for a year, it would reduce the number of refugees by 500,000.

Keywords: Instrumental Variables (IV) Estimation; Internal Con ict; Migration; Rebellion; Arms imports (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C26 D74 F22 H56 O10 O19 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 61 pp.
Date: 2019-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev and nep-mig
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:lau:crdeep:19.10

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