_<u>Table 4: Poverty and Conflict Debt at Sub-national Regions in Africa: UCDP and ACLED data.</u>_

||(1)<br>Poverty rate|(2)<br>Poverty rate|(3)<br>Poverty rate|(4)<br>Poverty rate|
|---|---|---|---|---|
|Conflict debt|14.13***|5.705*|9.974***|5.295**|
||(3.670)|(3.055)|(3.182)|(2.140)|
|Violence data|UCDP|UCDP|ACLED|ACLED|
|Country fixed effects|No|Yes|No|Yes|
|Population weight|Yes|Yes|Yes|Yes|
|Adjusted R-squared|0.0425|0.602|0.0322|0.604|
|Observations|618|618|618|618|

Notes: Robust standard errors in parentheses. * p<0.1, ** p<0.05, *** p<0.01. The dependent variable is poverty rate (in percent). Conflict debt is the discounted history of conflict years where a conflict year is defined as by more than 0.08 fatalities per 1,000 population. The regressions are on the cross-sectional data of sub-country regions in Africa between 2005-2018 whenever sub-regional poverty rates are available.

# Evidence from within Uganda

In order to drill into the dynamics at the regional level, we look at conflict history and poverty rates in a case study with comparable regional poverty data and more than one time-dimension: Uganda. We have access to poverty data for 2012 and 2016. This is a period a few years after the most intense fighting took place in Uganda and, in fact, we need to use the more detailed ACLED data so capture any armed violence in this period. However, what we will be able to study in Uganda are regional recovery trends. If our framework above is correct we should see a reversion to the mean in the regions that were most violent before and which are now catching up in terms of poverty numbers with the rest of the country. And this is exactly what we see in the data.

|_Table 5: _|_Poverty and Confl_<br>|_ict History in Ugan_<br>|_da 2012and 2016_<br>||
|---|---|---|---|---|
||(1)|(2)|(3)|(4)|
||<br>Poverty rate|<br>Poverty rate|<br>Poverty rate|<br>Poverty rate|
|Conflict debt|10.26<sup>***</sup><br>(1.606)|||1.928<br>(1.515)|
|County conflict debt||13.02<sup>***</sup><br>(0.975)||7.556<sup>***</sup><br>(1.103)|
|District conflict debt|||11.11<sup>***</sup><br>(0.730)|5.345<sup>***</sup><br>(0.592)|
|Sub-county fixed effects|Yes|Yes|Yes|Yes|
|Year fixed effects|Yes|Yes|Yes|Yes|
|Adjusted R-squared|0.121|0.206|0.200|0.215|
|Observations|3026|3026|3026|3026|

Notes: The dependent variable is poverty rate (in percent). Conflict debt is the discounted history of conflict years where a conflict year is defined as by more than 0.08 fatalities per 1000 population. We use average population to avoid time variation in the denominator of the indicator. County and district conflict debts are computed in the same manner at higher administrative units, respectively. Regressions are on the balanced panel dataset in 2012 and 2016. Robust standard errors in parentheses. * p<0.1, ** p<0.05, *** p<0.01 Figure 6 shows a strong correlation between conflict debt and poverty within Uganda. In particularly, the formerly violent North is also poorer. Second, as conflict debt is reduced over time, so is poverty. This raises the question of whether regions that were most heavily affected by poverty are catching up with the rest of the country. We test this more specifically in Table 5. Here we first look at the conflict debt at the sub-county level. We control for regional fixed effects and a time dummy for 2016 to capture general trends in poverty. There is a statistically and economically significant relationship between conflict history and the poverty rate at the regional level. Importantly, this relationship holds controlling for sub-county fixed effect which rules out long-term fixed characteristics driving the 17