Civil Wars and Economic Growth: Spatial Dispersion

This article quantifies the impact of civil wars on economic growth at home and in nearby countries. Three alternative measures of nearness—contiguity, length of contiguous borders, and distance of closest approach—are used to capture the spatial dispersion of civil war consequences. We present short‐run panel estimates (at five‐year intervals) and long‐run (1961–95) panel estimates for the world. Generally, the distance measures, novel to this study, and not contiguity provides the most accurate measure of the diffusion of the negative economic consequences of civil wars on other countries. Unlike earlier studies, we also investigate the temporal influence of civil wars on growth at home and in nearby countries. Both the duration and the timing of civil wars have an economic impact.