Does Violent Conflict Make Chronic Poverty More Likely? The Mindanao Experience

This paper investigates whether provinces with violent conflict are more likely to experience higher rates of chronic poverty. The location of conflict areas in Mindanao was derived from Barandiaran (2002), while conflict intensity, defined as the annual number of battle-related deaths, was obtained from Gleditsch et al (2002). Following the findings of Jalan and Ravallion (1998) that education and health outcomes are key determinants of chronic poverty, the Human Development Index (HDI) and the Quality of Life Index (QLI) are used as proxy variables for chronic poverty. The HDI is a composite index of life expectancy, functional literacy, and real per capita income. The QLI is a composite index of number of births attended by a medical professional, under-five nutrition, and elementary cohort survival rate. T-tests of means for HDI and QLI were performed, comparing provinces with conflict and provinces without conflict. Results show that provinces experiencing conflict have significantly lower HDI outcomes relative to provinces that did not experience conflict. Pooled results for the QLI also show that a statistically significant difference between the means of provinces with and without conflict exists