Internal Conflicts and Shocks. A Narrative Meta-Analysis

Citation: Laville,Camille; Mandon, Pierre Jean-Claude. Internal Conflicts and Shocks. A Narrative Meta-Analysis. Policy Research working paper; no. WPS 10315 Washington, D.C.: World Bank Group.

Do income shocks locally affect internal conflicts? To address this question, this paper employs a meta-regression analysis of 2,464 infra-national estimates from 64 recent empirical studies on conflicts and income-related shocks in developing countries. After accounting for publication selection bias, we show that, on average, wealth-increasing shocks in the agricultural sector are negatively associated with the local risk of conflict. Nonetheless, we find no average effect of wealth-decreasing shocks in the agricultural sector and wealth-increasing shocks in the extractive sector on the local risk of conflict. We also show that studies that fail to uncover empirical effects that conform to researchers’ expectations on the theoretical mechanisms are less likely to be published. Differences in the geographical area of study, in the choice of control variables, and in the way shocks are measured substantially explain the heterogeneity among estimates in the literature.