On the economic costs of political instabilities: a tale of sub-Saharan Africa

The relationship between political instability (PI) and economic development has been extensively debated in the social sciences, yielding contrasting empirical results. In this article, we synergise two novel techniques—synthetic control (SC) and matrix completion (MC)—to study the economic effects of PI events on the sub-Saharan African scene. Our identification strategies capture potential spatial and temporal heterogeneities of treatment effects. We show that PI inflicts statistically and economically significant collateral damage, albeit heterogeneous across economies and over time. Notably, the group average treatment effect on the treated (ATT) reveals output shrinkage of approximately 17–20 percentage points. Exploiting the temporal dimension of the two techniques, we find that although output loss persists into the long run, the bulk of the damage is wrecked in the short run. This finding particularly casts doubt on the full economic recovery hypothesis in the near aftermath of a PI episode. Furthermore, we unearth spatial heterogeneities of the effects where we show that the negative effects are disproportionately more pronounced for economies which experience protracted PI episodes. Lastly, our paper demonstrates that while both methods provide reliable counterfactuals, the MC estimator yields significantly better pre-treatment fit in our data than the SC framework.