The Economic Impact of Armed Conflict in Rwanda

The human, social and economic costs of Rwanda's genocide have been staggering. The losses in life cannot be reversed and the psychological impact of the violence will take a long time to heal. The country has made remarkable progress over the last 10 years to get back to where it would have been without the conflict--for example, in terms of trends for basic education and health indicators such as primary enrollment and child mortality. Yet GDP per capita remains much lower than what it would have been without the genocide. The paper proposes a methodology for the estimation and correction of extreme values or outliers and estimates that per capita GDP today would probably be between 25 and 30% higher if the conflict had not taken place. Copyright 2005, Oxford University Press.