Replication Data for: Economic Grievances and Civil War: An Application to the Resource Curse

A large body of scholarship suggests that economic grievances play an important role in civil wars. But what specific economic activities trigger such grievances, and why would governments not take proactive steps to limit economic grievances in order to stabilize their regimes? This article argues that specific economic activities—those that undermine a producer’s ability to exit the formal economy—cause governments to make taxation decisions that, despite the costliness of fighting, increase the likelihood of civil war. An inability for producers to exit the formal economy also undermines regional autonomy deals by encouraging governments to grab short-term rents despite the risk of triggering civil war. After deriving this “redistributive grievance” mechanism by analyzing an infinite-horizon bargaining model with endogenous labor supply and economic production, I address a specific empirical source of such redistributive grievances: oil-rich regions fight separatist civil wars relatively frequently. Capital-intense, geographically concentrated, and immobile oil production corresponds with conditions in the formal model that predict redistributive grievances and war. Moreover, I argue that applying the redistributive grievances mechanism to understanding the oil-separatism relationship also highlights shortcomings of alternative “greed”-based explanations.诸多学术研究均表明，经济不满在内战中发挥着重要作用。但究竟是哪些具体经济活动会触发此类不满？又为何政府不会采取积极举措限制经济不满以稳固自身政权？本文提出，特定经济活动——即削弱生产者退出正规经济能力的活动——会促使政府做出征税决策，即便平叛成本高昂，仍会提升内战爆发的概率。生产者无法退出正规经济，还会破坏地区自治协议：因为这会诱使政府不惜触发内战的风险攫取短期租金。本文通过构建包含内生劳动供给与经济生产的无限期议价模型，推导出这一“再分配型不满”机制，随后针对此类再分配型不满的一类具体实证场景展开探讨：石油富集地区相对频繁地爆发分裂主义内战。资本密集、地理集中且不可移动的石油生产，恰好契合该形式化模型中预测会引发再分配型不满与战争的前提条件。此外，本文认为，将再分配型不满机制用于解读石油与分裂主义之间的关联，也能凸显出替代性的“贪婪”型解释的不足之处。