Does a bad economy lead to civil unrest or is it vice versa?
Christa Brunnschweiler, Senior Lecturer in Economics at the University of East Anglia, determines which comes first.
Christa Brunnschweiler is a Senior Lecturer in Economics. She holds a PhD in Economics and an MA in Political Science from the University of Zurich.
Her research interests are in applied economics. She has mainly explored topics in economic growth and development, particularly in resource economics and conflict studies. Her work has been published in several journals including Science, the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Oxford Economic Papers, and World Development. One of her articles on the natural resource curse won the 2009 biannual Erik Kempe Award in Environmental and Resource Economics.
Economic Backwardness and Civil Unrest
Economically more backward countries are more likely to experience both non-violent and violent civil unrest, and the link has been growing stronger in recent decades. The greater the development gap with the world economic leader, defined as the United States, the more likely a country has experienced non-violent and violent mass demonstrations for regime change and, to a lesser degree, armed civil conflict and even civil war.
We believe this is due to a combination of two factors. First, people compare their economic status with that of their peers. Traditionally, your peers were your neighbors and co-nationals, and you sought to emulate them in behavior known as “catching up with the Joneses”. More recently, however, globalisation and the spread of digital media have made international comparisons simpler and more common.
The second factor regards the ease of catching up with those who are better off: political inability, or the suppression by government of activities that might threaten the position of the ruling elite, can make it difficult to emerge from economic backwardness. Put the two together, and you might get a dangerous build-up of popular discontent that can erupt into various forms of social tension.
Uncovering this new link between economic backwardness and civil unrest is very interesting, but even more importantly, we are able to show that economic backwardness causes social tension, not the other way around. This implies that economic development is not only desirable for its own sake, but also because a widening gap between development leaders and laggards poses serious risks for peace and internal stability in the countries left behind.
