Rural Windfall or a New Resource Curse? Coca, Income, and Civil Conflict in Colombia

By Joshua D. Angrist, Adriana D. Kugler. Review of Economics and Statistics, 2005

516 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We study the consequences of an exogenous upsurge in coca prices and cultivation in Colombia, where most coca leaf is now harvested. This shift generated only modest economic gains in rural areas, primarily in the form of increased self-employment earnings and increased labor supply by teenage boys. The rural areas that saw accelerated coca production subsequently became considerably more violent, while urban areas were affected little. These findings are consistent with the view that the Colombian civil conflict is fueled by the financial opportunities that coca provides and that rent-seeking by combatants limits the economic gains from coca.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science, Soil Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cc2d44031202d7ada400a84323b196e6b845f06c

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Citations in the corpus

Natural Resources: Curse or Blessing? (2011, background): “Diamonds (Paivi Lujala 2010), oil (Fearon and Laitin 2003; Ross 2004; Fearon 2005; Macartan Humphreys 2005) and narcotics (Angrist and Kugler 2008) especially increase the risk of civil war onsets.”
Natural Resources and Violent Conflict (2014, background): “Among the first studies, building on existing cross-country approaches, is a pioneering study by Angrist & Kugler (2008).”
The Resource Curse - What Have We Learned from Two Decades of Intensive Research: Introduction to the Special Issue (2017, background): “Some recent papers have shown that mineral-rich and mineral-poor regions within sovereign countries also follow different development trajectories (and for reasons similar to the ones explaining cross-country differences; for example, see Papyrakis & Gerlagh, 2007 for the United States, Shao & Qi, 2”
Trafficking Networks and the Mexican Drug War (2015, result): “The results also relate to work by Angrist and Kugler (2008) documenting that exogenous increases in coca prices increase”
Schooling, Violent Conflict, and Gender in Burundi (2011, unknown): “Similar results are found by Le o ´n (2011) for Peru, by Angrist and Kugler (2008) and Rodriguez and Sanchez (2009) for Colombia, by Chamarbagwala and Mora´n (2010) for Guatemala, and by de Walque (2006) for Cambodia.”
Escaping from the Resource Curse: Evidence from Botswana and the Rest of the World (2007, background): “Kronenberg, 2004). Natural resources that are traded on a black market, such coca and diamonds, are the extreme case, even though they do generate substantial economic gains in rural areas ( Angrist and Kugler, 2005 ).”
African Mining, Gender, and Local Employment (2014, background): “Exploiting within-country variation leads to more robust causal claims (e.g., Angrist and Kugler, 2008; Buhaug and Rød, 2006; De Luca et al., 2012; Dube and Vargas, 2013 on conflicts, Wilson, 2012 on sexual risk taking behavior in Zambia’s copper belt; and Aragon and Rud, 2013b on the local economy…”
This Mine is Mine! How Minerals Fuel Conflicts in Africa (2015, unknown): “(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8) Estimator LPM LPM Dep.”
War and poverty (2010, unknown): “Similar evidence is found in Akresh and Verwimp (2006), Akresh, Verwimp and Bundervoet (2007) and Akresh and de Walque (2008) for Rwanda, Bundervoet, Verwimp and Akresh (2009) for Burundi and Guerrero-Serdán (2009) for Iraq.”
A Closer Look at Oil, Diamonds, and Civil War (2006, methodology): “Most rely on qualitative data, although several use survey or other types of quantitative data (Angrist & Kugler 2005; Humphreys & Weinstein, unpublished manuscript) or employ formal models (Olsson & Fors 2004).”