Poverty and Witch Killing

Abstract

Many observers have noted that poverty and violence go hand in hand. There is a strong negative relationship between economic growth and crime across countries, as well as across districts in India, and a link between low income and the occurrence of civil war.1 Yet existing studies are typically unable to resolve the key econometric identification issues of omitted variable bias and endogeneity. To illustrate, the unobserved quality of local government institutions may affect both income growth and crime rates, and poverty could lead to violence if desperate people with nothing to lose commit more crimes, but violence itself may in turn affect economic productivity. This paper uses local rainfall variation to identify the impact of income shocks on murder in a rural Tanzanian district.2 Extreme rainfall-resulting in drought or floods-is exogenous and is associated with poor harvests and near-famine conditions in the region, and a large increase in the murder of witches: there are twice as many witch murders in years of extreme rainfall as in other years. The victims are nearly all elderly women, typically killed by relatives. These econometric results, across 11 years in 67 villages, provide novel evidence on the role of income shocks in causing violent crime, and religious violence in particular, and also provide insights into witchcraft-an important social phenomenon in Africa rarely studied by economists. The view that economic conditions are a driving force behind witch murders is bolstered by the fact that most witch killing in Tanzania takes place in poor rural areas largely dependent on rain-fed agriculture, and that most victims in our sample are from poor households. However, it is difficult to definitively disentangle this income shock theory from alternative socio-cultural explanations. The concentration of Tanzanian witch murders in a region dominated by one particular ethnic group (the Sukuma), and the especially high number of witch murders in villages where indigenous religious beliefs are strong both point to the important role of non-economic factors. Economic theories and cultural theories are perhaps best viewed as complements: the empirical findings demonstrate the power of economics to rationalize a phenomenon that has previously been understood almost solely through a socio-cultural lens.3