ABSTRACT
Since 1980, more than 50 countries have experienced significant periods of conflict with severe and lasting effects in terms of destruction of physical assets, disruption in trade links, displacement of people, and loss of income and life (genocide). For example, Rwanda was scarred by the genocide of 1994, in which around one million people were killed, three million people displaced, the gross domestic product halved, and poverty worsened. Damage estimates from the 15-year (1975-90) civil war in Lebanon have been as high as US$25 billion (150 percent of gross domestic product). In Bosnia-Herzegovina the cost of reconstruction has been estimated at US$5.1 billion (100 percent of gross domestic product). Lebanon’s post-conflict real per capita income was estimated at about one-third its 1975 level. Similarly, postwar incomes in Bosnia-Herzegovina have recovered to only about 70 percent of pre-war incomes.
