Part of the purpose of this report is to alert the international community to the adverse effects of civil war on development. The risk of civil war is much higher in low-income countries than in middle-income countries. The third finding is that feasible international actions can significantly reduce the global incidence of civil war.
Price crashes have been associated with severe recessions that directly increase the risk of civil war and have sometimes destabilized economic governance for extended periods.
The Report Team
Ibrahim Elbadawi, Håvard Hegre, Marta Reynal-Querol and Nicholas Sambanis formed the core staff of the project. In addition, the project has commissioned a large number of studies by researchers outside the World Bank. The project received funding from the Norwegian, Swiss and Greek governments; the World Bank Post-Conflict Fund; and the World Bank Research Committee.
Many of the project papers are referenced in the text of the report, and most of them are posted on the project's website: http://econ.
Acronyms and Abbreviations
Overview
Another component of the global phenomenon of conflict is the much greater risk that low-income countries face in stagnation or decline. The third component of the global phenomenon of conflicts is the countries that are currently in conflict. The last component of the global phenomenon of conflicts are those countries that are in the first decade of post-conflict peace.
Currently, reducing the global incidence of civil war is not included as a Millennium Development Goal.
CRY HAVOC: WHY CIVIL WAR MATTERS
The diverted resources are lost to productive activity, analogous to the loss of what economists call rent-seeking. Because much of the increase in military spending is on government forces paid for out of the state budget, resources are disproportionately diverted from government provision of useful public goods, such as health care and policing. However, while rent-seeking activities are simply unproductive, the increase in violence is harmful.
Men with guns, both rebel and government forces, can steal, rape and kill with impunity.
Civil War as Development in Reverse
Five years after the end of the civil war, the average score on this index is only 8.1 (Doyle and Sambanis 2003). Ghobarah, Huth, and Russett (2003) find that infectious diseases are the leading cause of indirect deaths from civil war. At the other end of the measurability spectrum is the psychological damage caused by civil war.
Many of the costs of war accumulate long after it is over.
Let Them Fight It Out Among Themselves?
Civil war has been a fundamental reason behind the observed increase in the incidence of malaria. The size of the refugee population from tropical countries with a civil war therefore has an important impact on malaria in the asylum countries. The economic spillover also increases the risk of civil war in neighboring countries (see Chapters 3 and 4).
In the past thirty years, three devastating social shocks have been made possible by civil war.
WHAT FUELS CIVIL WAR?
What Makes a Country Prone to Civil War?
Several other statistical models of insurgency initiation are available (see, for example, Elbadawi and Sambanis 2002; Fearon and Laitin 2003; Hegre et al. 2001; Reynal-Querol 2002a). In the largest civil war of the 20th century, Russia 1919-21, about 4 million men deserted from the Red and White armies. Clearly, it is difficult to obtain clear evidence of the importance of state financing of rebel groups.
Similarly, clear evidence points to the involvement of the governments of Rwanda, Uganda and Zimbabwe in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Government of Liberia in Sierra Leone. Unlike other sources of finance for the insurgency, diaspora contributions are sensitive to the media image of the rebel group. A post-Soviet aphorism states that controlling one kilometer of the Russian border was enough to make a millionaire (see Box 3.4).
As Russia was heavily protectionist, border controls made it possible to smuggle goods into the country. Those who see themselves as blackmailers benefit from the absence of the rule of law in the areas they control. Because the average civil war lasts about seven years, the income per population at the end of the war about 15 percent lower than it would otherwise have been.
For a typical country experiencing civil war, this effect of war would increase the risk by 13.5 percent and the duration by 5.9 percent, so that the long-term incidence would increase by 16.9 percent.5. A related feedback loop operates through the impact of conflict on the structure of the economy. The other half of the risk is due to things that happen during the conflict but are not included in the analysis.
In many situations of the gravest injustices, both currently and historically, rebellion does not occur.
Why Is Civil War So Common?
In the simulation, waves of decolonization gradually push the global incidence of conflict up to a self-sustaining level of nearly 12 percent by 2020. Thus, changes in the risk of rebellion are due to changes in the variables included in the model. Changes in the global incidence depend both on these two divergent trends and on the relative size of the two groups.
However, the global incidence of civil war will increasingly be dominated by wars in the group of poor, declining, primary commodity exporting countries, while the incidence of war in the successful group of developers decreases. These two changes mean an increase in the risk of starting a war by an additional 5 percent. Latin America experienced a severe period of conflict in the 1980s, but has shown remarkably positive development since the end of the Cold War (figure 4.15).
Perhaps the most disturbing trend is the increase in violent conflicts in sub-Saharan Africa (Figure 4.18). As with global incidence, changes in the incidence of civil war in Africa consist of three components: a movement towards the self-sustaining level, a change in the level caused by changes in the risk of rebellion, and a change in the level caused by changes. during the duration of the conflict. Africa has experienced very different trends from other developing regions, both in terms of the risk of conflict emerging and their expected duration.
The behavior of two groups of states will increasingly dominate the global spread of civil war: marginalized states and those trapped in conflict. Thus, promoting development in slow-growing, low-income countries is one of two critical interventions to reduce the global phenomenon of conflict.
POLICIES FOR PEACE
What Works Where?
Some of these policies may be implemented by the government of the threatened country, some by neighbors in the region, and some by the international community. Young people were marginalized in the economic and political collapse of the 1980s and increasingly turned to crime and drugs. Five percent of the royalties are supposed to benefit local communities in the oil-producing region.
A further possible strategy is to involve political leaders from the place of discovery in a prominent position in government. The IMF had credit instruments in the form of a compensatory financial fund, but they were rarely used. The Kimberley Process is a recognition that access to the diamond market needs to be regulated.
It was so successful that it was largely responsible for the collapse of the Khmer Rouge (see box 5.4). A recent study of the duration of conflict offers some insight into the possible consequences of deepening such a discount (Collier, Hoeffler and Söderbom 2003). One of the reasons for the conflict trap may be that rebellion seems to pay off as a strategy.
The integration of part of the rebel forces into the national army could be one such solution. The growth spurt is concentrated in the middle four or five years of the decade. A recent study focuses on the determinants of growth in all the post-conflict episodes of the 1990s (Collier and Hoeffler 2002a).
Let's say the country had a policy score of 4.0 by the end of the first decade.
An Agenda for
International Action
To substantially reduce the global incidence of conflict, policy changes are critical, both in OECD countries and in marginalized low-income developing countries. Monterrey is not just crying into the wind: the international community has recently demonstrated an unprecedented capacity for collective action. Providing aid in post-conflict situations An important area where the international community has probably not managed aid well is during the first decade after a conflict.
The latest data show that aid is particularly effective at increasing growth during the post-conflict decade, but is more effective in the middle of the decade than at the beginning. Refocusing aid on low-income countries A second area where the international community is probably wrong is the distribution of aid among countries. Providing aid in an environment of poor policy and weak governance A third area in which the international community has likely misunderstood aid is in its composition.
Aid Diffusion A fourth aspect in which the international aid community probably got it wrong is its overall scope. Using Aid to Strengthen Existing Democratic Institutions A final aspect in which the international aid community probably got it wrong is its treatment of political change. There are strong reasons to criminalize such transactions in the country where the company is incorporated, similar to the OECD agreement criminalizing international bribery.
Increasing the transparency of income from natural resources The governments of low-income, resource-rich countries have a strong interest in the various proposals for international action. Such reporting can either be to the general public, as envisaged in the "publish what you pay".
