Population Size and Civil Conflict Risk: Is There A Causal Link?

By Markus Brückner. 2010

114 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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.

Subfields: Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science, Soil Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8370217001a899207b0de2f4f4e572f04246183b

Citations in the corpus

• Extreme Weather and Civil War: Does Drought Fuel Conflict in Somalia through Livestock Price Shocks? (2014, unknown): “The twostage regressions with cattle prices of export and local quality yield almost identical partial effects (table 5), which confirms that both the export and domestic market are similarly responsive to drought, as we argued in the second section of this article.17 Similarly, alternative normaliz”