Growth and Violence: Argument for a Per Capita Measure of Civil War

Abstract

This article proposes a new measure of civil war. The measure defines violence intensity in casualties per capita instead of number of casualties. We discuss the assumptions behind this per capita model and the existing standard model. We show that the two measures behave differently in standard growth regressions and argue that this is because the standard model is a mis-specification in this context. Casualties appear to affect growth more in smaller populations. We argue that a debate on the right model can help distinguish between competing theories in the conflict literature. This is particularly relevant given the current development of new micro-data in this field.