The role of rainfall in Africa’s ethnic conflicts | VOX, CEPR’s Policy Portal
▻http://voxeu.org/article/role-rainfall-africas-ethnic-conflicts
In recent work, we empirically investigate whether inequality between ethnic groups affects ethnic conflict prevalence in the African continent between 1982 and 2001 – the period for which our main data sources were all available (Guariso and Rogall 2017). The analysis is based on an innovative rainfall-based measure of inequality between ethnic groups.
Our approach uses the observation that agriculture employed most people in Africa, and at the same time has been highly dependent on weather conditions.1 Variations in rainfall are therefore likely to lead to variations in agricultural production and income.
The link between rainfall and income across Africa has already been highlighted, starting with Miguel at al. (2004). To the best of our knowledge, however, we are the first use this to investigate the role of inequality. Using weather data, we can overcome both issues of data availability – as high-frequency data are systematically collected for the entire continent – and endogeneity – as changes in the distribution of rainfall are not caused by conflict.
#inégalités #conflits #précipitations #pluviométrie #Afrique #cartographie