Country Economic Memorandum
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Publication Lake Chad Regional Economic Memorandum: Development for Peace(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-11-09) Granguillhome, Rogelio; Hernandez, Marco; Lach, Samantha; Masaki, Takaaki; RodrÃguez-Castelán, CarlosThis report sheds light on the interlocked long-term territorial development challenges and the recently realized systemic risks affecting the Lake Chad region. It summarizes the findings of seven technical papers, each investigating different aspects of the interlinked challenges faced by the region. These studies are accompanied by complementary research on labor market and geospatial socioeconomic trends, as well as by a review of the thin literature on economic development across the region. In addition to presenting the main results of the technical papers, the report positions the findings in the broader context of an analytical framework depicting the feedback mechanisms between the region’s territorial development gaps and the self-reinforcing link to shocks, namely, violent conflict and climate change. This analytical framework is presented in Section 1.2. The rest of the report is structured as follows. Section 1.3 describes the main social and economic trajectories in the region. It reviews long-term demographic trends, suggesting. Section 1.4 argues that the low-growth, high-poverty equilibrium observed in the region is closely linked to the region’s economic geography. Section 1.5 discusses how the impact of climatic variation and violent conflict experienced in the region interlink with and exacerbate the territorial development challenges. Section 1.6 presents policy directions structured around four crosscutting themes: infrastructure, trade, governance, and natural resource management. The crosscutting nature of these themes encourages the exploration of potential synergies across challenge areas. The discussion in the section aims to inform policy-making efforts to strengthen territorial development and mitigate the impacts of conflict and climate change. Such endeavors can increase the likelihood of breaking free from the self-reinforcing negative mechanisms and boost the potential return of the region to a path of stability and inclusive economic development.Publication Lake Chad Regional Economic Memorandum: Technical Paper 6. Building Rural Development in the Lake Chad Region(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-11-09) Blankespoor, BrianThis paper examines the relationship between access to markets and land cultivation following Berg et al. (2018) using panel methods. Then, author contextualize these results within the broader recent development challenges of the Lake Chad region. The results provide evidence that an increase in market access is associated with an increase in cultivated land and is positively associated with an increase in local agricultural GDP. Even so, conflict from the rise of Boko Haram in the past decade can attenuate gains whereby the proximity to conflict events in the previous year is associated with less cropland across the entire region and less night time lights from over a hundred local markets nearby Lake Chad. This paper makes two contributions. First, the importance of market access as part of economic development is well known, yet advancements in measurement of agricultural activity derived from satellite data and recent data are necessary to gain current insight given developments in the region. Second, this paper contextualizes the findings of market access with local conditions given the numerous conflict events in the past decade from Boko Haram. The rest of this paper is structured as follows. Section two describes the data sources while section three presents the empirical framework, section four presents the results, and section five concludes.Publication Lake Chad Regional Economic Memorandum: Technical Paper 5. Conflict and Climate Change in the Lake Chad Region(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-11-09) Fisker, Peter; Fisker, PeterPeace and security are basic conditions for economic and social development. Conflict, on the other hand, can reverse years of economic growth and induce long-term harm on almost all aspects of development. For the past decade, the Lake Chad region has been the setting of conflicts between government forces and armed groups, most notably the Boko Haram. Although the intensity of fighting has petered off in recent years, the conflict has spread from Northern Nigeria and now affects all four countries of the region. Due to the paramount importance of avoiding armed conflict, a large economic literature exists that seeks to find explanations for the onset and prevalence of conflict in developing countries. Blattman and Miguel [2010] list some of the most common theories of conflict including competition for resources, economic grievances, and the possibility of looting. This paper attempts to shed light on the geographical distribution of conflict and its climatic determinants in the Lake Chad region following a sub-national approach where readily available spatial data is employed at two different units of aggregation: Firstly, 90 second level administrative areas, and secondly, around 5,318 grid cells covering the same region. Exposure to conflict is here defined as the intensity (for districts) or incidence (for cells) of conflict in a given unit each year. Parts of the population may not be directly exposed by this definition, but since the units of analysis are relatively small, most will be affected in some ways, for instance by safety concerns when visiting the nearest towns to trade or by the general economic consequences.