EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Trade, Insecurity, and the Costs of Conflict

Michelle Garfinkel, Stergios Skaperdas and Constantinos Syropoulos ()

No 2022-8, School of Economics Working Paper Series from LeBow College of Business, Drexel University

Abstract: Typically, economics assumes that property rights over productive resources or goods are perfectly defined and costlessly enforced. The costs of insecurity and the resultant conflict are, however, real and often economically significant. In this paper, we examine how international trade regimes affect the costs of conflict and, in turn, how the desirability of international trade is affected by these costs. We consider both domestic and international conflict. Trade openness reduces the costs of these types of conflict for countries that import goods whose production relies on supplies of contested resources. For countries that export such goods, trade openness intensifies conflict. The effect of conflict on the allocation of productive resources through prices under trade can also explain the “natural resource curse” and can overturn a country’s natural comparative advantage. Finally, we consider alternative channels through which trade can affect arming and conflict costs, with effects that can either improve or worsen international relations

Keywords: Insecure resources; trade openness; the gains from trade; domestic conflict; interstate conflict (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 C78 D30 D70 D74 F10 F51 F60 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 27 pages
Date: 2022-06-16
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-int
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BNhcDCxXu1ahXmQSl ... Q3i/view?usp=sharing Full text (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Trade, Insecurity, and the Costs of Conflict (2022) 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:ris:drxlwp:2022_008

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in School of Economics Working Paper Series from LeBow College of Business, Drexel University Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Richard C. Barnett ().

 
Page updated 2025-04-01
Handle: RePEc:ris:drxlwp:2022_008