The Oil Curse by Ross Michael L

Author:Ross, Michael L.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2012-01-31T16:00:00+00:00

These numbers show the percentage of countries that had a new civil war in a given year.

* significant at 10%, in a one-tailed t-test

** significant at 5%

*** significant at 1%

Source: Calculated from data in Gleditsch et al. 2002.

GLOBAL PATTERNS OF CONFLICT

Many statistical studies find that oil production is connected to a country’s civil war risk.25 The simplest way to show this is by calculating the annual rate at which both oil and non-oil states suffer from civil wars. Between 1960 and 2006, countries without petroleum faced a 2.8 percent chance each year that a new conflict would break out; countries with petroleum had a 3.9 percent annual conflict risk, almost 40 percent higher (see table 5.1, row one).

These overall figures conceal some important differences. Having oil has no discernible effect on conflict in relatively rich countries, but boosts the conflict risk of low- and middle-income states by almost 80 percent (see table 5.1, rows two and three).

We can also look at the data with scatterplots. Figure 5.1 displays all low- and middle-income countries, according to their oil income (on the horizontal axis), and the number of conflicts they had between 1960 and 2006 (on the vertical axis). Remember that if oil is abundant enough to lift a country into the high-income bracket (e.g., Saudi Arabia), it will reduce the danger of civil war. By looking only at low- and middle-income countries, I am excluding these cases—and hence see a fitted line that slopes upward, suggesting that among these countries, more income from petroleum is linked to more frequent conflicts.

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