Internal Conflicts and Shocks. A Narrative Meta-Analysis

Do income shocks locally affect internal conflicts To address this question, this paperemploys a meta-regression analysis of 2,464 infranational estimates from 64 recent empirical studies on conflicts andincome-related shocks in developing countries. After accounting for publication selection bias, the analysisfinds that, on average, wealth-increasing shocks in the agriculture sector are negatively associated with the localrisk of conflict. Nonetheless, the analysis finds no average effect of wealth-decreasing shocks in the agriculture sectoror wealth-increasing shocks in the extractive sector on the local risk of conflict. The paper also shows that studiesthat fail to uncover empirical effects that conform to researchers’ expectations on the theoretical mechanisms areless likely to be published. Differences in the geographical area of study, the choice of control variables, and the wayshocks are measured substantially explain the heterogeneity among estimates in the literature.