Greed and Grievance in Civil War

Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler ()

Development and Comp Systems from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: We investigate the causes of civil war, using a new data set of wars during 1960-99. We test a `greed’ theory focusing on the ability to finance rebellion, against a`grievance’ theory focusing on ethnic and religious divisions, political repression and inequality. We find that greed considerably outperforms grievance. Consistent with the greed theory, both dependence upon primary commodity exports and a large diaspora substantially increase the risk of conflict. Inconsistent with the grievance theory, greater ethnic and religious diversity reduce the risk of conflict. The results are robust to correction for outliers, alternative variable definition, and variations in estimation method.

Keywords: Conflict; Development; Natural Resources; Panel Data (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C23 C25 D74 H56 O13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 44 pages
Date: 2004-09-15
Note: Type of Document - pdf; pages: 44
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1139)

Downloads: (external link)
https://econwpa.ub.uni-muenchen.de/econ-wp/dev/papers/0409/0409007.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Greed and grievance in civil war (2004)
Working Paper: Greed and grievance in civil war (2000)
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:wpa:wuwpdc:0409007

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Development and Comp Systems from University Library of Munich, Germany
Bibliographic data for series maintained by EconWPA ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).