Premium
Environmental Depletion, Governance, and Conflict
Author(s) -
Rus Horatiu A.
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
southern economic journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.762
H-Index - 58
eISSN - 2325-8012
pISSN - 0038-4038
DOI - 10.4284/0038-4038-78.4.1305
Subject(s) - endogeneity , corporate governance , language change , civil conflict , economics , politics , government (linguistics) , resource (disambiguation) , panel data , public economics , environmental quality , resource depletion , civil society , quality (philosophy) , variety (cybernetics) , natural resource , environmental governance , political science , ecology , econometrics , art , computer network , linguistics , philosophy , literature , finance , epistemology , artificial intelligence , computer science , law , biology
While the link between natural resource dependence and internal conflict has been approached from a variety of angles in a large and growing interdisciplinary literature, the feasibility‐discontent dichotomy still frames a fluid research agenda in both economics and political science. This article attempts to help bridge the gap by allowing for both intrinsic and extrinsic motivations of potential rebels. Simple non‐cooperative bargaining yields a nonlinear impact of regulatory quality on the likelihood of conflict and shows that corruption and resource depletion jointly affect the outcome. The empirical analysis that follows looks at the effect of environmental depletion and government corruption on the emergence of civil conflicts using a large panel data set. Resource depletion, the quality of governance, and their interaction are found to be significant determinants of civil conflict incidence. Results are robust to model and specification as well as to several steps taken to address potential endogeneity concerns.