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Journal of African Economies Advance Access originally published online on January 18, 2007
Journal of African Economies 2007 16(3):349-392; doi:10.1093/jae/ejl042
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© The author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Centre for the Study of African Economies. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Economic Mobility in Rural Rwanda: A Study of the Effects of War and Genocide at the Household Level

Marijke Verpoortena,1 and Lode Berlagea,2

a Catholic University of Leuven, Department of Economics, Leuven, Belgium

1 Corresponding author: Research Scholar of the Fund for Scientific Research—Flanders (FWO–Vlaanderen). E-mail: marijke.verpoorten{at}econ.kuleuven.be

We study welfare gains and losses in a sample of 188 rural households in two Rwandan provinces over the time span 1990–2002. Our sample is unique because it covers a period of extreme and widespread violence. Using an economic mobility analysis, we seek to identify the impact of the shocks of the war, the genocide and their aftermath on long-term household welfare. To measure economic mobility between 1990 and 2002, we use both net income per adult equivalent and an asset index. We find that households experiencing the murder or imprisonment of one of their members moved considerably downwards in the income distribution. However, households affected by other war-related shocks such as the number of months taken refuge and the loss of physical capital were not worse off in 2002 compared with other households.

JEL codes: 131, O15, O12

2 We are grateful to MINAGRI (Rwandan Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock) and USAID for the use of the pre-war dataset, and to Philip Verwimp for the tracing of the households in 1999/2000. Field research for the post-war data set was made possible by funding from DGOS (Belgian General Direction of Development Assistance) and VLIR (Flemish Interuniversity Council). We would like to thank Rodrigo Alfaro, Geert Dhaene, Stefan Dercon, Romain Houssa, Andy McKay, Robrecht Renard, Mark Schaffer and Jo Swinnen for their helpful comments. We also thank two anonymous referees and the editor of this journal for their suggestions for improving the quality of the paper. The authors are exclusively responsible for all errors and omissions. All views and opinions expressed are theirs alone.


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