Food Prices and Political Instability

By Rabah Arezki, Markus Brückner. Social Science Research Network, 2011

182 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We examine the effects that variations in the international food prices have on democracy and intra-state conflict using panel data for over 120 countries during the period 1970-2007. Our main finding is that in Low Income Countries increases in the international food prices lead to a significant deterioration of democratic institutions and a significant increase in the incidence of anti-government demonstrations, riots, and civil conflict. In the High Income Countries variations in the international food prices have no significant effects on democratic institutions and measures of intra-state conflict. Our empirical results point to a significant externality of variations in international food prices on Low Income Countries' social and political stability.

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Citations in the corpus

The Food Crises and Political Instability in North Africa and the Middle East (2011, background): “[5] R.”
Feeding unrest (2014, background): “Arezki & Brückner (2011) find that political institutions in low-income countries deteriorate significantly when international food prices increase, largely because those increases ‘significantly increased the likelihood of civil conflict and other forms of civil strife, anti-government…”
Global food prices, regime type, and urban unrest in the developing world (2015, background): “Our findings likely diverge from Arezki & Brückner (2011) due to our use of fixed effects and our sample, which includes few high-income countries.”
Food Security, Safety, and Sustainability—Getting the Trade-Offs Right (2020, background): “Food insecurity affects low-income groups most with increased risks of hunger and malnutrition The International Monetary Fund (Arezki and Brückner, 2011) found in low-income countries a correlation between rising food prices and social unrest.”
Extreme Weather and Civil War: Does Drought Fuel Conflict in Somalia through Livestock Price Shocks? (2014, methodology): “The method to account for the bias—proposed by King and Zeng (2001)—is difficult to implement because of convergence problems (Arezki and Brückner 2011).”
Rising Food Prices, Food Price Volatility, and Social Unrest (2015, unknown): “…intrsection of economics and political science studying the determinants of riots (DiPasquale and Glaeser, 1998; Bohlken and Sergenti, 2010), but it is closest in spirit to a concurrent study by Arezki and Brückner (2011), who look at the relationship between food prices and political instability.”