ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates whether civil wars have economic causes. Explanations of particular civil wars often invoke such causes. For example, the war in Rwanda has been attributed to pressure on land, while that in Angola has been interpreted as a contest for natural resources. The subject has not, to our knowledge previously been investigated. A related study by Bennett and Stam (1996) investigates the duration of international wars in terms of political and military variables. We utilize a comprehensive data set of civil wars (Singer and Small, 1982, 1994) and attempt to explain why they occurred in terms of underlying economic variables. Section 8.2 discusses the variables used in the analysis, basing them on a simple analytic framework. Section 8.3 presents the results, and Section 8.4 concludes.
