The Economic Origins of Conflict in Africa

By Eoin F. McGuirk, Marshall Burke. Journal of Political Economy, 2017

180 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We study the impact of global food price shocks on local violence across Africa. In food-producing areas, higher prices reduce conflict over the control of territory (“factor conflict”) and increase conflict over the appropriation of surplus (“output conflict”). We argue that this difference arises because higher prices increase the opportunity cost of soldiering for producers while simultaneously inducing consumers to appropriate surplus as real wages fall. In areas without crop agriculture, higher prices increase both forms of conflict. We validate our local-level findings on output conflict using survey data. Our findings help reconcile a growing but ambiguous literature on the economic roots of conflict.

Subfields: Demography, Economics and Econometrics, Soil Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/889de1e11289cadb938941b4329f6dbd1ebd54c1

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Demography

1. A. Olper
2. Marzio Galeotti
3. C. Falco

In Economics and Econometrics

1. A. Olper
2. Marzio Galeotti
3. C. Falco

In Soil Science

1. A. Olper
2. Marzio Galeotti
3. C. Falco

Citations in the corpus

• Climate change and migration: Is agriculture the main channel? (2019, background): “12See, for example, McGuirk and Burke (2017), who studied the relationships between food price changes and conflicts in Africa countries, or Bazzi (2017) who showed that positive agricultural income shocks increase or decrease emigration in Indonesia, depending on the size distribution of…”