Economic and social impacts of conflict: A cross-country analysis

It is important to understand how conflicts within or between countries impact national economic and social development pathways, requiring policymakers to design effective mechanisms to counter the regressive effects of conflict. We explored the relationships between conflict and different types of development outcomes: economic growth, life expectancy, and educational attainment. We applied a dynamic fixed effects estimator to an autoregressive distributed lag model using 1996–2019 panel data for 109 countries. This method enabled us to identify the different short- and long-term effects of conflict on development by mitigating the endogenous effects of the variables. Subsample analyses according to the income levels of countries produced interesting results: the higher a country's income level, the less significant the negative effects of conflict on its development. •This paper examines the conflict–development nexus for 109 countries in 1996–2019.•We employed autoregressive distributed lag models with dynamic fixed effects.•Conflicts negatively affect both short- and long-term economic and social outcomes.•The higher the income level of a country, the less adverse the effects of conflict.•The correction of disequilibrium happens slowly and unevenly among countries.