I’m not sure that the link between crime and income in the West sheds much light on the link between income shocks and civil war in entirely different cultures. If such generalisations worked then that would substantially reduce the workload of researchers everywhere 😛

The link between crime (including violent crime) and negative shocks to income is well established for Western countries. There is also evidence that negative shocks to income inequality are particularly destructive. Where income and measures of income inequality ‘bounce’ back following such a shock there is usually a considerable lag before crime drops away correspondingly (actually quite interesting).

Is there any reason why things should be different for commodity based economies in Africa? I suppose that the article cited shows that this is not the case.

However I’m not really sure that this research is ‘salient advice’ that the world has been waiting for to allow it to start helping in Africa during times of (relative) poverty. Poverty in itself is a problem, and if it was considered not important enough by those who control aid to begin with, evidence of the added incidence of violence probably won’t do it either.

At a more basic level though, is this ‘new’ evidence anyway, or just another development paper that, true, does contribute to the literature, but doesn’t practically help deal with the institutional problems that are really the problem?