Article ID Journal Published Year Pages File Type
7361552 Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 2017 17 Pages PDF
Abstract
It is often purported that unusually dry weather conditions provoke small-scale social conflict-riots-by intensifying the competition for water. The present paper explores this hypothesis, using data from Sub-Saharan Africa. We rely on monthly data at the cell level (0.5×0.5 degrees), an approach that is tailored to the short-lived and local nature of the phenomenon. Using a drought index to proxy for weather shocks, we find that a one-standard-deviation fall in the index (signaling drier conditions) raises the likelihood of riots in a given cell and month by 8.3%. We further observe that the effect of unusually dry weather conditions is substantially larger in cells with a lower availability of water resources (such as rivers and lakes), a finding that supports the significance of the competition-for-water mechanism.
Keywords
Related Topics
Social Sciences and Humanities Economics, Econometrics and Finance Economics and Econometrics
Authors
, , ,