Conflict, Military Aid & Commodity Values An empirical study on the Colombian civil war
Year: 2015
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Armed conflicts in any country highlight the frictions within society. Armed conflict brings untold miseries not only to the participants of the conflict but also to the innocent civilians caught up in it. Economics gives us better tools to understand conflicts. Over the period, researchers tried to understand conflict through different instruments, such as inequality, polarization, ability of groups to appropriate resources and income shocks etc. In my thesis, I have chosen to study conflict through income shocks. Using Colombian civil war and two recent articles as a guide, I try to gauge effect of violence on the internal price and revenue generated by coffee sector. I also use data on military and narcotic aid to augment my analysis. I study the effect of conflict on the price and value of coffee production in Colombia. I find some evidence that increase in paramilitary attacks is associated with lower internal prices and revenues for coffee production. Then I use military aid as an instrument for conflict specifically for paramilitary attacks and find similar results. The results are robust even to the inclusion of various controls.
Author: Naeem Sabir Khan
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W950257008