A few countries are at a greater risk of civil war than others with specific communal, political, and financial factors causing a persistent enhancement in the incidence of civil war. It is an established fact that “Civil war is now far more common than international conflict” (Collier and Hoeffler, p. 563). The characteristic aspect of civil war is the materialization and perseverance of an insurgent army which can be based on the core factors of impetus as well as achievability. Consequently, there may be a rarity in the occurrences of civil wars since the conditions which stimulate the development of secretive armed forces are uncommon, or alternately because the feasible circumstances for such revolt factions are exceptional.
In-text, there has been an emphasis on inspiration rather than viability. Entailed in the issue of motivation is a modern and rather controversial difference has been ‘greed or grievance’, “rebel groups often more than cover their costs during the conflict” (Collier and Hoeffler p.564). In the case that a country is going through a period of a financial recession, it will consequently have a low per-person earning or “mean income per capita”( Collier and Hoeffler p.569) and will be highly reliant on principal commodity exports augmenting the prospects of a civil war.
Evidently, the chief outcome of civil war is the loss of life and general depression in the healthiness of the population at large. The accurate cost of human beings costs cannot be projected but Collier and Hoeffler do manage to offer a rough calculation for the financial expenses of civil war. They do so by emphasizing the local and regional expenditure since they believe that the worldwide cost cannot be enumerated.
On the national level, they estimate a Gross National Product “per capita GDP” (Collier and Hoeffler p.574) loss, along with the crucial loss of human life. Further, the wellbeing of a national populace is additionally decreased owing to the amplified military expenses all through and also subsequent to the war. It has been elucidated that in nearly forty percent of the civil wars, there is another outbreak of a civil war as “intense conflicts may have a higher risk of repetition” (Collier and Hoeffler p. 575) in the subsequent ten years costs of which augment the financial estimates. Caused by regional spill effects even the growth of adjoining nations is negatively impacted as they will also be likely to spend additionally on their military due to the regional arms battle. Collier and Hoeffler, approximate the local and regional costs of the average civil war in the region of sixty-four billion dollars which is excluding the global costs that are obviously colossal in scale but complex for the allocation of expenditure.
Predictably, the occurrence of civil war diminishes development throughout the phase of the struggle. The most apparent monetary expenditure occurs from the immediate devastation of road and rail and all transportation networks and Collier elucidates four supplementary consequences. Community sources such as “food, non-food agriculture, oil, other raw materials, and a residual category of mixed” (Collier and Hoeffler p.580), are rerouted from industrious actions to aggression and there is an increase in opportunism as time perspectives abridge, there is a departure of not only monetary but also human assets as both exit from the country by “population dispersion and social fractionalization” (Collier and Hoeffler p.581) and there is a paradigm reallocation of activities from susceptible trade and industry activities in the direction of cultivation and farming as these do not include the potential risks for survival.
According to Collier and Hoeffler, a single year of internal battle decreases the development of a country by around 2.2 percent with “observations of highly negative growth” (Collier and Hoeffler p.582). In view of the fact that, approximately, civil struggles last for nearly seven years, by the time the struggle ends, the face of the economy will be 15 percent lesser than what it could have been, had the war not occurred. After the conflict though the economy naturally recuperates at nearly one percent over its regular growth rate, this outcome almost certainly tapers. Thus “Growth remains significant, and its coefficient is only slightly reduced. …. the increased risk of conflict due to slow growth is not confined to episodes of growth collapse but is a more continuous relationship” (Collier and Hoeffler p.582).
By and large, it takes approximately an enormous twenty-one years to get back to the level of GDP that would have subsisted in the absence of the conflict, as many of the overheads accumulated following the war have ended. There would obviously be extra added costs that are too intricate to enumerate as they are acquired not only by the country which conflicts but the entire region incorporating the forced immigration and amplified diseases.
Besides all these direct financial overheads, the indirect monetary loss that a conflict brings to human life can be gauged by ‘Disability Affected Life Years’ (DALYs). Typically, struggle results in a projected 0.5 million DALYs every year for all the years that the war continues, thereby an assumption of a resurgence episode comprising of twenty-one years provides a numeral of 5 million DALYs. (Singer, D.J. and Small, M., 1994)Thus if each DALY is valued at one thousand dollars which is nearly the per-person earning in many endangered nations, the financial expenditure of damage to human health due to a usual war is around five billion dollars.
There is a further danger of potential occurrences of costs owing to the conflict trap, as countries that have recently had an occurrence of a civil war are prone to having additional clashes. This brings the whopping figure of the total national and regional cost of a single war to be roundabout sixty five billion dollars (Collier 1998).
Thus it is clearly visible how internal struggles pose a severe danger to the economic development of a nation and experimental workings have exposed that conflicts have the potential of can ripping downward the stages of economic development which take a multitude of years to accomplish. Even after their cessation, the follow-ups of conflicts carry on to limiting the processes of economic development (Collier 1998).
This economic examination of the outcome of civil war has indisputably at the hypothetical level, positioned crucial potential resolutions into the structure of enticement instead of principles or individuality. At the experimental stage, it has staged an inquiry of the validity of the reasons accentuated in historical literature thereby providing scope for far more economic work, equally at the theoretical as well as the empirical level.
Economists must associate with psychologists to discover the practice of selection and to even link with historians to achieve this purpose because civil wars are often included in the historical domain of hostility and hatred.
Finally, the accurate study of a civil war is a matter of great concern as the estimated costs are roundabout one hundred billion dollars per year and “political and social variables that are most obviously related to grievances” (Collier and Hoeffler p.563). High mortality rates are a grave concern during the wars and there is additional damage to humans at the psychological level as well. There is general health deterioration in the average human’s life and all these results or outcomes of war can never be separated from the economics that involves them. The onslaught of innumerable diseases that a struggle or internal conflict brings about with it is immeasurable.
There is brutality at all levels and children die along with millions of women being raped during these conflicts. The onus then lies on the government to establish policies for the prevention of wars and in case such occurrences do take place then the entire focus should, of course, be on its cessation and further recurrence. The ill-effects of war are known to all and as such these conflicts must be avoided at all times and in all circumstances if human life is to be given its due.
References
Collier, P. and Hoeffler, A. (2002). ‘Greed and grievance in civil war’, CSAE Working Paper, WPS 2002–01, Oxford University.
Collier, P. and Hoeffler, A. (1998). ‘On the economic causes of civil war’, Oxford Economic Papers, 50, 563–73.
Singer, D.J. and Small, M. (1994). ‘Correlates of war project: international and civil war data, 1816–1992’, data file, Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research, Ann Arbor, MI.