We used two different measures of civil<sup>disturbance. One, which is used in Easterly and</sup> Levine (1997), is from Sivard (1996), who collects<sup>annual information on the numbers of</sup> people killed because of civil conflict or war fought<sup>on the national territory. The other,</sup> food aid, more generally proxies for overall<sup>disturbances-</sup> economic or other.

The information collected in Sivard allowed<sup>us to test not only whether civil strife and</sup> urbanization were related, but also whether the<sup>impact on urbanization varied with the</sup> severity of the domestic disturbances. We<sup>constructed three measures based on the</sup> information collected in Sivard: SIVARD, which<sup>indicates that the country was</sup> mentioned in Sivard as having some form<sup>of civil strife; SIV1000, indicating that the</sup> country had more than 1000 deaths; and<sup>SIV5000, which were countries with more than</sup> 5000 war-related deaths in the 5 preceding<sup>years.</sup> Regression 9 shows that countries that experienced<sup>civil strife tend to be more urbanized,</sup> holding all other variables equal. The severity of<sup>the conflict does not appear to matter,</sup> as SIVARD yielded a better fit than SIV1000 or SIV5000.

The positive correlation between urbanization<sup>and civil strife is very sensitive to sample</sup> changes, and is mostly driven by East Asian countries.<sup>Contrary to common perception,</sup> over the 1960-95 period, it is not in Africa<sup>that most civil strife occurred. Mentioned in</sup> Sivard for some form of civil strife are 34% of<sup>the observations for East Asia, 24% for</sup> Middle East and North Africa, and 20% each<sup>for Africa and Latin America. The</sup> prolonged nature of civil unrest in countries such<sup>as Cambodia, Myanmar, and the</sup> Philippines seems to have contributed to their urbanization.

Clearly, however, whether people seek refuge<sup>in cities may depend on the nature and</sup> structure of the conflict. In Burundi, for example,<sup>people did move to Bujumbura to</sup> escape the risk of slaughter. In Rwanda, on the<sup>other hand, one group dominated Kigali,</sup> so that when refugees came back from Zaire, they<sup>tended to remain in the rural areas.</sup> Both these countries have experienced civil strife<sup>and war over prolonged periods of</sup> time, yet remain among the two least urbanized countries<sup>in the world.</sup> Our alternative measure of domestic hardships, food<sup>aid, is collected by the FAO. It</sup> measures tons of cereal and non-cereal food aid received<sup>by a country. We expected both</sup> measures (deflated by population) to be positively<sup>correlated with levels of urbanization,</sup> given that aid is probably more readily available<sup>in urban centers and that it is probably</sup> received in times of famine (which would most likely<sup>be pushing people out of the</sup> countryside). However, we find in regression 10<sup>that cereal food aid (FOODAIDC) has a</sup> negative sign and that non-cereal food aid (FOODAIDNC)<sup>is positive. Both these results</sup> are very vulnerable to the introduction of<sup>other variables.</sup>

# **_Ease of access to urban center_**

A basic elements in standard migration models is<sup>the ability of rural dwellers to move to</sup> urban areas, which is affected by the availability of transportation<sup>and the distance to the</sup> city. To proxy ease of transportation we used road<sup>density, and for distance to urban</sup> centers we used population density.

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