Working Paper: Conflicts and the New Scramble for African Resources -- A Shift-Share Approach

Abstract

This paper estimates the causal effect of mineral trade on conflicts in Africa using a Shift-Share IV approach based on an exogenous price-commodity shock. The main result is that an increase in mineral trade significantly increases the number of conflicts while it has no clear effect on fatalities. Exploring heterogeneous effects, I find that a specific group of minerals, oil and fuels, drives the results on the number of conflicts. Moreover, the group of rare minerals such as coltan, precious metals or cobalt has no effect on the number of conflicts but appears to have an important impact on the number of fatalities.