ABSTRACT
The impact of violent political conflict, including war, clearly manifests itself in terms of adverse health outcomes. Assessing these health outcomes involves documentation of the effects of political violence, and a variety of typologies exist for doing this (see, e.g., Zwi and Ugalde, 1989). A key drawback of these approaches is that one cannot assess the extent of the impact by simply applying one or another typology to various country situations. This chapter extends previous work on the epidemiology of the health burden of conflict and war by introducing a notion of cost by which to evaluate the health impact of conflict situations. Indeed, there has been little in the way of economic analysis of the cost of conflict in the context of developing countries (Stewart, 1993).
