Continuing the examination today of the thirteenth lecture from Professor Michael Spagat’s Economics of Warfare course that he gives at Royal Holloway University. It is posted on his blog Wars, Numbers and Human Losses at: https://mikespagat.wordpress.com/
My last post didn’t get past his second page as I ended up pontificating about his two rather significant statements on data. They were:
- To get anywhere with empirical research you need to have a reasonably large number of data points. (This is a basic fact about empirical analysis that many students beginning research projects overlook)
- So we need to ask ourselves — where are all of these data points going to come from?
The lecture then looks in depth at one country: Colombia. He ends up looking at a paper that measured “commodity prices” compared to civil intensity. They looked at two issues 1) Do higher wages reduce conflict in coffee-growing municipalities (as measured by increased prices in coffee) and 2) does wealth attract violence from armed groups (as measure by oil prices in those municipalities that have oil).  Anyhow, they do find higher levels of violence in coffee growing regions compared to other regions during the time when international coffee prices fell. It also indicated that increases in oil prices did lead to some higher levels of violence for the paramilitaries in Colombia, but these effects were not very large. The rather interesting conclusion (slide 18) is “Dube and Vargas [the study authors] calculate that the fall in coffee prices between 1997 and 2003 translates into an additional 1013 deaths in coffee growing areas….”
Hmm…..I wonder if any of this could apply to growing opium poppies in Afghanistan?
Anyhow, still not finished with this particular lecture, and will pick up discussing the rest of it later. The link to the lecture is here: http://personal.rhul.ac.uk/uhte/014/Economics%20of%20Warfare/Lecture%2013.pdf
