Ethnicity, Trade, and Inequality

What are the primary causes of civil violence? In this book the author explores theories of both war and conflict using five independent variables: trade openness, ethnic polarization, ethnic fractionalization, political inequality, and economic inequality. The author argues that to better understand the econometric interplay between the independent variables and conflict, it is necessary to stratify the sampled countries by regime type, (autocracy, anocracy, and democracy). This book finds that after controlling for a variety of potentially confounding variables, trade openness decreases the probability of civil war onset. When controlling for alternate theoretical views, ethnicity and political inequality are positively related to civil violence. Economic inequality is consistently insignificant in pooled regression models.