Civil war and economic growth: the case for a closer look at forms of mobilization

Abstract

This paper explores the idea that the lack of robust evidence on the growth impact of civil war could partially be a consequence of considering civil war as a unified conceptual category, regardless of the ordinate of group identity invoked in mobilizing for war. To do so, we distinguish explicitly between episodes of internal conflict where contestants mobilized along the lines of ethnicity and ones where mobilization occurred along other markers of group identity. Using alternative definitions of civil war and System GMM estimation to address the endogeneity of conflict and per capita income, we obtain a negative contemporaneous impact of non-ethnic civil war on economic growth over the period 1975–2005. By contrast, the impact of ethnic war is statistically insignificant.