Publication: Lake Chad Regional Economic Memorandum: Technical Paper 3. Estimating the Spillover Economic Effects of Foreign Conflict - Evidence from Boko Haram
Loading...
Published
2021-11-12
ISSN
Date
2021-11-16
Editor(s)
Abstract
Violent conflicts present a formidable threat to regional economies. Throughout the world, border regions in many countries are possibly impacted by the cross-border economic effects of regional insurgencies in neighboring countries or national state failures, i.e. "bad neighbors". This raises two questions. First, what is the magnitude of the spill-over economic effects of foreign conflict and what are the channels through which they operate Second, what policies can governments adopt in the potentially exposed regions to mitigate such spill-over effects. In this paper, we adopt a difference-in-difference (DiD) framework leveraging the unexpected rise of the Boko Haram insurgency in Northeastern Nigeria in 2009 to study its economic effects in neighboring areas in Cameroon, Chad and Niger that were not directly targeted by Boko Haram activities. We find strong cross-border economic effects that are likely driven by reduced trade activities, not the diffusion of conflict. Factors of local economic resilience to this foreign conflict shock then include trade diversification and political and economic securitization. More generally, conflicts, if they have regional economic effects, may necessitate regional responses.
Link to Data Set
Citation
“Jedwab, Remi; Blankespoor, Brian; Masaki, Takaaki; Rodríguez-Castelán, Carlos. 2021. Lake Chad Regional Economic Memorandum: Technical Paper 3. Estimating the Spillover Economic Effects of Foreign Conflict - Evidence from Boko Haram. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/36574 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
Digital Object Identifier
Associated URLs
Associated content
Other publications in this report series
Journal
Journal Volume
Journal Issue
Collections
Related items
Showing items related by metadata.
Publication Lake Chad Regional Economic Memorandum(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-11-09)There is a vast economic literature studying the effects of climate change on long-run growth, migration, urbanization, and human capital, among several other outcomes. The paper is structured as follows: Section 3.2 dives into some of the physical characteristics of Lake Chad and its water sources. Section 3.3 introduces our novel data. Section 3.4 presents the hypothesis and empirical strategy behind our analysis. Sections 3.5, 3.6 and 3.7 present results on total population, cities and roads, respectively. Finally, section 3.8 concludes.Publication Lake Chad Regional Economic Memorandum(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-11-09)The Lake Chad region, which is an economically-and socially integrated area spanning across four countries of Chad, Cameroon, Niger, and Nigeria in north-west Africa, has been trapped in a vicious circle of suboptimal territorial development and fragility. This note shows that the Lake Chad region lags in multiple dimensions of development ranging from poverty, human capital, and access to services. A poverty rate in the Lake Chad region is found to be much higher than other parts of the countries surrounding the lake. The regional poverty rate in the Extreme North region of Cameroon (59 percent) is three times higher that of the rest of the country (19 percent). In Nigeria, the Lake Chad region203 has a poverty rate (72 percent) nearly twice as high as in the rest of the country (38 percent). Chad is the only exception, where the poverty rate in the country’s Lake Chad region (31 percent) is lower than the rest of the country (40 percent).204 This is explained by the fact that the Chad region around the lake lies near the capital of the country, with a consequently higher urbanization rate and a relatively high population density. The note is organized as follows. Section 2.2 provides key statistics on poverty, sector of work, and human capital indicators in the Lake Chad region vis-à-vis other parts of the country and examine how the Lake Chad lags behind in different dimensions. Section 2.3 provides a diagnostic of economic geography with a focus on three dimensions of density, distance and division. Section 2.4 identifies a set of structural factors, aggregate shocks and selected policies that might be associated with the dynamics of economic activity and social inclusion across the region.Publication Lake Chad Regional Economic Memorandum(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-11-09)This 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(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-11-09)This 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 The Effects of Climate Change in the Poorest Countries(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-09-05)Empirical studies of the economic effects of climate change largely rely on climate anomalies for causal identification purposes. Slow and permanent changes in climate-driven geographical conditions, that is, climate change as defined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, have been relatively less studied, especially in Africa, which remains the most vulnerable continent to climate change. This paper focuses on Lake Chad, which used to be the 11th largest lake in the world. Lake Chad, which is the size of El Salvador, Israel, or Massachusetts, slowly shrank by 90 percent for exogenous reasons between 1963 and 1990. While the water supply decreased, the land supply increased, generating a priori ambiguous effects. These effects make the increasing global disappearance of lakes a critical trend to study. For Cameroon, Chad, Nigeria, and Niger—25 percent of Sub-Saharan Africa’s population— the paper constructs a novel data set tracking population patterns at a fine spatial level from the 1940s to the 2010s. Difference-in-differences show much slower growth in the proximity of the lake, but only after the lake started shrinking. These effects persist two decades after the lake stopped shrinking, implying limited adaptation. Additionally, the negative water supply effects on fishing, farming, and herding outweighed the growth of land supply and other positive effects. A quantitative spatial model used to rationalize these results and estimate aggregate welfare losses, which accounts for adaptation, shows overall losses of about 6 percent. The model also allows studying the aggregate and spatial effects of policies related to migration, land use, trade, roads, and cities.
Users also downloaded
Showing related downloaded files
Publication The State of the Global Education Crisis(UNESCO, Paris, UNICEF, New York, and World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-12-10)Even before Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) hit, the world was already experiencing a learning crisis. 258 million primary- and secondary-school age children and youth were out of school. Many children who were in school were learning very little: 53 percent of all ten-year-old children in low- and middle-income countries were experiencing learning poverty, meaning that they were unable to read and understand a simple age-appropriate text at age 10. This report spotlights how COVID-19 has deepened the education crisis and charts a course for creating more resilient education systems for the future. Section one gives introduction. Section two documents COVID-19’s impacts on learning levels by presenting updated simulations and bringing together the latest documented evidence on learning loss from over 28 countries. Section three explores how the crisis has widened inequality and had greater impacts on already disadvantaged children and youth. Section four reviews evidence on learning recovery from past crises and highlights current policy responses that appear most likely to have succeeded in stemming learning losses, while recognizing that the evidence is still in a nascent stage. The final section discusses how to build on the investments made and the lessons learned during the pandemic to accelerate learning recovery and emerge from the crisis with increased education quality, resilience, and equity in the longer term.Publication World Development Report 2006(Washington, DC, 2005)This year’s Word Development Report (WDR), the twenty-eighth, looks at the role of equity in the development process. It defines equity in terms of two basic principles. The first is equal opportunities: that a person’s chances in life should be determined by his or her talents and efforts, rather than by pre-determined circumstances such as race, gender, social or family background. The second principle is the avoidance of extreme deprivation in outcomes, particularly in health, education and consumption levels. This principle thus includes the objective of poverty reduction. The report’s main message is that, in the long run, the pursuit of equity and the pursuit of economic prosperity are complementary. In addition to detailed chapters exploring these and related issues, the Report contains selected data from the World Development Indicators 2005‹an appendix of economic and social data for over 200 countries. This Report offers practical insights for policymakers, executives, scholars, and all those with an interest in economic development.Publication Argentina Country Climate and Development Report(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-11)The Argentina Country Climate and Development Report (CCDR) explores opportunities and identifies trade-offs for aligning Argentina’s growth and poverty reduction policies with its commitments on, and its ability to withstand, climate change. It assesses how the country can: reduce its vulnerability to climate shocks through targeted public and private investments and adequation of social protection. The report also shows how Argentina can seize the benefits of a global decarbonization path to sustain a more robust economic growth through further development of Argentina’s potential for renewable energy, energy efficiency actions, the lithium value chain, as well as climate-smart agriculture (and land use) options. Given Argentina’s context, this CCDR focuses on win-win policies and investments, which have large co-benefits or can contribute to raising the country’s growth while helping to adapt the economy, also considering how human capital actions can accompany a just transition.Publication Digital Africa(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-03-13)All African countries need better and more jobs for their growing populations. "Digital Africa: Technological Transformation for Jobs" shows that broader use of productivity-enhancing, digital technologies by enterprises and households is imperative to generate such jobs, including for lower-skilled people. At the same time, it can support not only countries’ short-term objective of postpandemic economic recovery but also their vision of economic transformation with more inclusive growth. These outcomes are not automatic, however. Mobile internet availability has increased throughout the continent in recent years, but Africa’s uptake gap is the highest in the world. Areas with at least 3G mobile internet service now cover 84 percent of Africa’s population, but only 22 percent uses such services. And the average African business lags in the use of smartphones and computers as well as more sophisticated digital technologies that catalyze further productivity gains. Two issues explain the usage gap: affordability of these new technologies and willingness to use them. For the 40 percent of Africans below the extreme poverty line, mobile data plans alone would cost one-third of their incomes—in addition to the price of access devices, apps, and electricity. Data plans for small- and medium-size businesses are also more expensive than in other regions. Moreover, shortcomings in the quality of internet services—and in the supply of attractive, skills-appropriate apps that promote entrepreneurship and raise earnings—dampen people’s willingness to use them. For those countries already using these technologies, the development payoffs are significant. New empirical studies for this report add to the rapidly growing evidence that mobile internet availability directly raises enterprise productivity, increases jobs, and reduces poverty throughout Africa. To realize these and other benefits more widely, Africa’s countries must implement complementary and mutually reinforcing policies to strengthen both consumers’ ability to pay and willingness to use digital technologies. These interventions must prioritize productive use to generate large numbers of inclusive jobs in a region poised to benefit from a massive, youthful workforce—one projected to become the world’s largest by the end of this century.Publication Classroom Assessment to Support Foundational Literacy(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-03-21)This document focuses primarily on how classroom assessment activities can measure students’ literacy skills as they progress along a learning trajectory towards reading fluently and with comprehension by the end of primary school grades. The document addresses considerations regarding the design and implementation of early grade reading classroom assessment, provides examples of assessment activities from a variety of countries and contexts, and discusses the importance of incorporating classroom assessment practices into teacher training and professional development opportunities for teachers. The structure of the document is as follows. The first section presents definitions and addresses basic questions on classroom assessment. Section 2 covers the intersection between assessment and early grade reading by discussing how learning assessment can measure early grade reading skills following the reading learning trajectory. Section 3 compares some of the most common early grade literacy assessment tools with respect to the early grade reading skills and developmental phases. Section 4 of the document addresses teacher training considerations in developing, scoring, and using early grade reading assessment. Additional issues in assessing reading skills in the classroom and using assessment results to improve teaching and learning are reviewed in section 5. Throughout the document, country cases are presented to demonstrate how assessment activities can be implemented in the classroom in different contexts.