Fueling conflict? (De)escalation and bilateral aid
Richard Bluhm, Martin Gassebner, Sarah Langlotz & Paul Schaudt
#2016-053
This paper studies the effects of bilateral foreign aid on conflict
escalation and de-escalation. We make three major contributions. First,
we combine data on civil wars with data on low level conflicts in a new
ordinal measure capturing the two-sided and multifaceted nature of
conflict. Second, we develop a novel empirical framework. We propose a
dynamic ordered probit estimator that allows for unobserved
heterogeneity and corrects for endogeneity. Third, we identify the
causal effect of foreign aid on conflict by predicting bilateral aid
flows based on electoral outcomes of donor countries that are exogenous
to recipients. We establish that the effect of foreign aid on the
various transition probabilities is heterogeneous and can be
substantial. Receiving bilateral aid raises the chances of escalating
from small conflict to armed conflict, but we find no evidence that aid
ignites conflict in truly peaceful countries.
Keywords: conflict, foreign aid, political economy, dynamic ordered
panel data
JEL Classification: D74, F35, O11, C25