Population Size and Civil Conflict Risk: Is there a Causal Link

Does an expansion of the population size expose nation states to a higher risk of suffering from civil conflict? Obtaining empirical evidence for a causal relationship is difficult due to reverse effects and omitted variable bias. This article addresses causality issues by using randomly occurring d...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inThe Economic journal (London) Vol. 120; no. 544; pp. 535 - 550
Main Author Brueckner, Markus
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Oxford, UK Oxford, UK : Blackwell Publishing Ltd 01.05.2010
Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Blackwell Publishing
Oxford University Press
Subjects
Causality
Civil war
Civil wars
Commodity prices
Conflict
Drought
Economic conditions
Gross domestic product
Instrumental variables
Instrumental variables estimation
Least squares
Population
Population dynamics
Population economics
Population estimates
Population size
Population statistics
Rain
Risk assessment
Studies
Sub-Saharan Africa
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Summary:Does an expansion of the population size expose nation states to a higher risk of suffering from civil conflict? Obtaining empirical evidence for a causal relationship is difficult due to reverse effects and omitted variable bias. This article addresses causality issues by using randomly occurring drought as an instrumental variable to generate exogenous variation in population size for a panel of 37 Sub-Saharan countries over the period 1981-2004. Instrumental variable estimates yield that a 5% increase in population size raises the risk of civil conflict by around six percentage points.
Bibliography:http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0297.2010.02352.x
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ArticleID:ECOJ2352
The article has benefited from discussion at the Second Riccardo Faini Doctoral Conference, the labour workshop at Pompeu Fabra, the CAEPS seminar at the Universitat de Barcelona, the 2009 CSAE conference on African development at the University of Oxford, the 2009 conference of the Royal Economic Society, the 2009 conference of the European Society of Population Economics, and the 2009 conference of the Econometric Society European Meeting. I am grateful to Antonio Ciccone, Marta Reynal-Querol, Roland Vaubel, Joachim Voth, two anonymous referees as well as seminar and conference participants for helpful comments and suggestions.
The article has benefited from discussion at the Second Riccardo Faini Doctoral Conference, the labour workshop at Pompeu Fabra, the CAEPS seminar at the Universitat de Barcelona, the 2009 CSAE conference on African development at the University of Oxford, the 2009 conference of the Royal Economic Society, the 2009 conference of the European Society of Population Economics, and the 2009 conference of the Econometric Society European Meeting. I am grateful to Antonio Ciccone, Marta Reynal‐Querol, Roland Vaubel, Joachim Voth, two anonymous referees as well as seminar and conference participants for helpful comments and suggestions.
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ISSN:0013-0133
1468-0297
DOI:10.1111/j.1468-0297.2010.02352.x