IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/wbk/wbrwps/4254.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The causes of civil war

Author

Listed:
  • Djankov, Simeon
  • Reynal-Querol, Marta

Abstract

The dominant hypothesis in the literature that studies conflict is that poverty is the main cause of civil wars. The authors instead analyze the effect of institutions on civil war, controlling for income per capita. In their set up, institutions are endogenous and colonial origins affect civil wars through their legacy on institutions. Their results indicate that institutions, proxied by the protection of property rights, rule of law and the efficiency of the legal system, are a fundamental cause of civil war. In particular, an improvement in institutions from the median value in the sample to the 75th percentile is associated with a 38 percentage points'reduction in the incidence of civil wars. Moreover, once institutions are included as explaining civil wars, income does not have any effect on civil war, either directly or indirectly.

Suggested Citation

  • Djankov, Simeon & Reynal-Querol, Marta, 2007. "The causes of civil war," Policy Research Working Paper Series 4254, The World Bank.
  • Handle: RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:4254
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/WDSContentServer/WDSP/IB/2007/06/15/000016406_20070615144341/Rendered/PDF/wps4254.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Héctor Galindo Silva, 2007. "Polarización económica y emergencia de confilctos violentos internos un estudio empírico," Documentos de Economía 4449, Universidad Javeriana - Bogotá.
    2. Chandra Sriram & Marie-Joëlle Zahar, 2009. "The Perils of Power-Sharing: Africa and Beyond," Africa Spectrum, Institute of African Affairs, GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies, Hamburg, vol. 44(3), pages 11-39.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:4254. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Roula I. Yazigi (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/dvewbus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.