Scholars of economic development have argued that war can have adverse impacts on later economic performance: war destroys physical capital and infrastructure and disrupts human capital accumulation, and it may also damage institutions by creating political instability, destroying the social fabric and endangering civil liberties (World Bank 2003). Understanding war’s impact on development is particularly important for Sub-Saharan Africa, where two-thirds of all nations suffered from armed conflict during the 1980s or 1990s. The proliferation of armed conflict in the world’s poorest region begs the question of what role conflict may be playing in Africa’s disappointing economic performance. Yet the net long run effects of war are ambiguous from the point of view of economic theory. To the extent that war impacts are limited to the destruction of capital, the neoclassical model predicts rapid economic growth postwar converging back to steady state growth. Several recent papers that study war impacts – including in Japan (Donald R. Davis and David E. Weinstein, 2002) and Vietnam (Edward A. Miguel and Gerard Roland 2005) – find few persistent local impacts of U.S. bombing, with heavily bombed areas experiencing rapid recovery to prewar population and economic trends. This is consistent with the neoclassical model if war’s main consequence is to destroy capital. War could also affect long run growth – either positively or negatively – by modifying the scale parameter in the neoclassical growth model. For example, while World Bank (2003) argues that war has adverse institutional consequences, Charles H. Tilly shows how war promoted state formation and nation building in Europe historically, ultimately strengthening institutions (Tilly 1975). 1 In this short paper, we study the aftermath of the recent civil conflict in Sierra Leone. One notable aspect of this project is the extensive household data for Sierra Leone on conflict experiences and on local institutions. Our results are complementary to the other recent studies mentioned above, none of which examines institutional impacts.

In Sub-Saharan Africa, there are active debates about whether increases in energy access should be driven by investments in electric grid infrastructure or small-scale “home solar” systems (e.g., solar lanterns and solar home systems). We summarize the results of a household electrical appliance survey and describe how households in rural Kenya differ in terms of appliance ownership and aspirations. Our data suggest that home solar is not a substitute for grid power. Furthermore, the environmental advantages of home solar are likely to be relatively small in countries like Kenya, where grid power is primarily derived from non-fossil fuel sources.

Ethnic favoritism is seen as antithetical to development. This paper provides credible quantification of the extent of ethnic favoritism using data on road building in Kenyan districts across the 1963–2011 period. Guided by a model, it then examines whether the transition in and out of democracy under the same president constrains or exacerbates ethnic favoritism. Across the post-independence period, we find strong evidence of ethnic favoritism: districts that share the ethnicity of the president receive twice as much expenditure on roads and have five times the length of paved roads built. This favoritism disappears during periods of democracy.

A large literature has examined how best to target antipoverty programs to those most deprived in some sense (e.g., consumption). We examine the potential trade-off between this objective and targeting those most impacted by such programs. We work in the context of an NGO cash transfer program in Kenya, employing recent advances in machine learning methods and dynamic outcome data to learn proxy means tests that jointly target both objectives. Targeting solely on the basis of deprivation is not attractive in this setting under standard social welfare criteria unless the planner’s preferences are extremely redistributive.