Interregional Inequality and Civil Conflict: Are Spatial Disparities a Threat to Stability and Peace?

Abstract

This article examines the link between interregional inequality and civil conflict in a panel of 125 countries over the period 1993–2013. The results show that the level of interregional inequality has a positive and statistically significant effect on the incidence of civil conflict, which implies that countries with higher regional income disparities are more likely to experience internal violence. This result is not driven by a specific group of influential countries and is robust to the inclusion in the analysis of a substantial set of covariates that may affect both interregional inequality and civil conflict. Likewise, the observed link between regional income disparities and internal violence does not depend either on the estimation strategy or the measures used to quantify the degree of interregional inequality and the incidence of civil conflict within the various countries. These results suggest that policies designed to decrease the magnitude of regional income disparities may contribute to reducing the incidence of civil conflict.