Journal article
Inequality and conflict: Burning resources to support peace
Economics letters, v 197
Dec 2020
Featured in Collection : UN Sustainable Development Goals @ Drexel
Abstract
We consider a simple, guns-versus-butter model in which agents choose between “war” and “peace” to study the implications of inequality in resource ownership for equilibrium outcomes. Provided war is destructive, peace can emerge as the stable equilibrium, but only if the distribution of resource ownership is sufficiently even. We establish that, when this condition fails, the richer agent can destroy a portion of its resource endowment to even out the ex post distribution and thereby support peace. We also examine the importance of ex ante resource transfers and show that they are Pareto superior to burning resources.
•We study a single-period guns-vs-butter model of conflict between two agents.•The agents can choose either war or peace identified with the status quo.•Peace is more likely to emerge when resources are more evenly distributed.•Resource burning can promote peace, but is dominated by resource transfers.
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Details
- Title
- Inequality and conflict: Burning resources to support peace
- Creators
- Michelle R. Garfinkel - University of California, IrvineConstantinos Syropoulos - Drexel University
- Publication Details
- Economics letters, v 197
- Publisher
- Elsevier
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Language
- English
- Academic Unit
- Economics (School of Economics)
- Web of Science ID
- WOS:000600839700014
- Scopus ID
- 2-s2.0-85092366122
- Other Identifier
- 991019169105304721
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- Collaboration types
- Domestic collaboration
- Web of Science research areas
- Economics