VOLUME 4, ISSUE 3, 2009 <Previous Next> Economic Shocks and Civil War Sylvain Chassang Gerard Padró i Miquel SUGGESTED CITATION: Sylvain Chassang and Gerard Padró i Miquel (2009) "Economic Shocks and Civil War", Quarterly Journal of Political Science: Vol. 4:No 3, pp 211-228. http:/dx.doi.org/10.1561/100.00008072 Download this article Tell a Colleague Get Acrobat Reader Printing Tip: Select the option to 'print as image' in the Acrobat print dialog to ensure the article prints as it appears on screen. Learn more... This article revisits the relationship between income per capita and civil conflict. We begin by documenting that the empirical literature identifies two different patterns. First, poor countries have a higher propensity to suffer from civil war. Second, civil war occurs when countries suffer negative income shocks. In a formal model we examine an explanation often suggested in the informal literature: civil wars occur in poor countries because the opportunity cost of fighting is small. We show that while this explanation fails to make sense of the first empirical pattern, it provides a coherent theoretical basis for the second. We then enrich the model to allow for private imperfect information about the state of the economy and show that mutual fears exacerbate the problem caused by negative income shocks.

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