Camille Laville has just published a working paper entitled «Internal Conflicts and Shocks. A Narrative Meta-Analysis», written with Pierre Mandon, economist at World Bank.
Do income shocks affect the risk of internal conflict locally?
To answer this question, this paper uses a meta-regression analysis of 2,464 sub-national estimates from 64 recent empirical studies on conflict and income shocks in developing countries. After controlling for publication bias, the analysis reveals that, on average, wealth-increasing shocks in the agricultural sector are negatively associated with local conflict risk. Nevertheless, the analysis reveals no average effect on local conflict risk of wealth-decreasing shocks in the agricultural sector or wealth-increasing shocks in the extractive sector. The article also shows that studies that fail to demonstrate empirical effects in line with researchers' expectations regarding the underlying theoretical mechanisms are less likely to be published. Differences in the geographical area studied, the choice of control variables and the way in which shocks are measured largely explain the heterogeneity of estimates in the literature.
