Between a rock and a hard place: do civil war governments make protectionist trade policy?
By: Aysegul Aydin
´¡²ú²õ³Ù°ù²¹³¦³Ù:Ìý
Resource-based models of civil war heavily emphasize natural resources to explain onset and intensity but make no mention of whether civil war governments craft trade policies to control the same resources in wartimes. I investigate the economic logic that drives wartime trade policies in raw minerals and primary agriculture commodities. Analysis of an extensive database of trade restrictions in the agricultural sector between 2005 and 2014 shows that when governments face competing societal demands as in civil war, they prioritize consumers over producers by adopting export measures in agriculture. These results hold when we account for negative agricultural shocks, underscoring the centrality of food security to governments’ logic of survival in civil wars. I also find that null effects of civil wars on raw minerals suggesting that governments are unwilling or unable to change trade policy in the mining sector.