FERDI-WP266-Civil Conflict and Firm Recovery: Evidence from Post

Pap ing er rk o W s fondation pour les études et recherches sur le développement international e D i 266May c e li ve 2020 o lopment P Civil conflict and firm recovery: Evidence from post-electoral crisis in Côte d’Ivoire* Florian Léon Ibrahima Dosso Florian Léon, Research Officer, FERDI. [email protected] Ibrahima Dosso, Consultant, World Bank, PhD Student, Université Clermont Auvergne, CERDI. [email protected] Abstract This paper examines how firms recover after a short, but severe, external shock. Thanks to a rich firm-level database, we follow surviving formal enterprises before, during and after the 2011 post-electoral crisis in Côte d’Ivoire. Main findings are summarized as follows. First, recovery was rapid in the first year but imperfect: three years after the shock, firms did not reach their previous level of productivity. Second, we show a wide heterogeneity in recovery across firms (within the same industry). Young and local firms were more able to rebound after the crisis. In addition, credit-constrained firms were less resilient, highlighting the importance of access to credit in post-crisis periods. Finally, the recovery was higher for labor- intensive firms but firms relying more on skilled workers and managers faced a lower rebound. Key words: Political violence; Firm; Recovery; Africa; Labor. JEL Classification: D22; L25; N47; O12. * We would like to thank the National Institute of Statistics for sharing data with us. We also thank Pierrick Baraton, Luisito Bertinelli, Arnaud Bourgain, Joël Cariolle, Lisa Chauvet, Boubacar Diallo, Marie-Hélène Hubert, Jordan Loper, Patrick Plane, Laurent Weill and Alexandra Zins, as well as participants at African Development Bank (Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire) and CERDI (Clermont-Ferrand, France), and audiences at JMA (Casablanca, Morocco) and AFSE Conference (Orléans, France), for their helpful advice. Any errors are our own. This research was supported by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche of the French government through the program “Investissements d’avenir” (ANR-10-LABX-14-01), through the IDGM+ initiative led by Ferdi (Fondation pour les études et recherches sur le développement international). LA FERDI EST UNE FONDATION RECONNUE D’UTILITÉ PUBLIQUE. RECONNUE LA FERDI EST UNE FONDATION ET LA GOUVERNANCE MONDIALE (IDGM). POUR LE DÉVELOPPEMENT L’INITIATIVE L’IDDRI ELLE MET EN ŒUVRE AVEC CERDI ET À L’IDDRI. AU LE LABEX IDGM+ QUI L’ASSOCIE ELLE COORDONNE D’AVENIR» TITRE DU PROGRAMME «INVESTISSEMENTS AU L’ANR FRANCAIS GÉRÉE PAR A BÉNÉFICIÉ D’UNE AIDE DE L’ÉTAT CETTE PUBLICATION LA RÉFÉRENCE «ANR-10-LABX-14-01». PORTANT “Sur quoi la fondera-t-il l’économie du monde qu’il veut gouverner? Sera-ce sur le caprice de chaque particulier? Quelle confusion! Sera-ce sur la justice? Il l’ignore.” Pascal 1 Introduction Private firms in developing economies are essential to wealth and job creation but often suffer from external shocks such as commodity price bust, natural disaster, epidemio- logical crisis or conflict. In Africa, internal conflicts are a common source of instability, particularly at election times. More than half of all elections held in Africa experienced some form of violence before or after the election day (Burchard, 2015; Ksoll et al., 2019). Despite a large body of literature on the consequences of civil conflicts on socio-economic outcomes (Verwimp et al., 2019), our knowledge about the implications of conflicts on firms and entrepreneurship remains limited. In particular, while recent articles have pointed out that firms suffer during conflicts (e.g. Dupas and Robinson, 2010; Camacho and Rodriguez, 2013; Amodio and Di Maio, 2018), our knowledge about firm recovery after a conflict is rather scarce. A better understanding of how firms rebound after a shock is of prime importance in helping policymakers to effectively formulate policies that strengthen firm resilience in post-conflicts countries. The persistent effects of conflicts on firms is ambiguous, especially for short events (Blattman and Miguel, 2010). On the one hand, the disruption of business and the destruction of (human and physical) capital may be too limited to 1 have a profound or long-term effect. In addition, a rebound of economic activity may occur after a negative event due to reconstruction and/or because the crisis has had a cleansing effect. On the other hand, even short-lived shocks may have long-term effects due to the loss of specific assets (Collier and Duponchel, 2013) or delayed investments or hiring decisions (Baker et al., 2016). Furthermore, conflicts negatively affect human capital accumulation (education and health), public finance and social cohesion (Hjort, 2014), impeding firm growth in the long-term. In this article, we examine firm recovery after a short, albeit severe, civil conflict. In doing so, we follow performance of formal firms operating in Côte d'Ivoire before, during and after the 2010 post-electoral crisis. The Ivorian context is especially appropriate for our objective. From the 1990s, there were ethnic and political tensions, that peaked 1 Even strong physical destruction may have limited long-term impact, as documented in the literature on the impact of bombing (Davis and Weinstein, 2002; Miguel and Roland, 2011). Evidence from the literature on the consequences of natural disasters also points out that local events have a limited impact on global activity (Cole et al., 2017; Strobl, 2012). Ferdi P266 / Léon, F. and Dosso, I. >> Civil conflict and firm recovery... 1 in 1999 with conflicts that led to the First Ivorian Civil War from 2002 to 2007. The 2011 post-electoral crisis occurred in the context of this prior unrest. It was relatively short (less than 6 months) but devastating (resulting in more than 3,000 deaths and over 700,000 displaced persons) and followed by a quiet period (Figure 1). This paper tracks the evolution of the productivity of surviving firms before (2009-10), during (2011) and three years after the electoral crisis (2012-14). We exploit heterogeneity across firms to examine factors impacting firm recovery. Beyond the usual firm characteristics (sector, age, size, ownership), we dedicate special attention to the supply channel (e.g., input cost 2 and availability). For each firm, we identify whether it relied more on labor (quantity and quality) and capital before the crisis than its counterparts in the same industry. We then scrutinize how dependence on specific input shapes its recovery. Main results can be summarized as follows. First, our analysis indicates that firms had only partially recovered three years after the crisis. The level of (labor) productivity decreased on average by 20% during the crisis. One year after the conflict, half of the losses was recoup. However, three years after the crisis, the level of productivity remained ten percent lower than prior to the crisis. Second, we show a wide heterogeneity in recovery across firms (even within the same industry). Small (in terms of employees) and local entreprises recovered, contrary to large and foreign-owned firms. Furthermore, credit- constrained firms suffered more and were less able to recover than non-credit constrained firms. Interestingly, the access of capital played a role after the crisis but did not help firms to limit losses during the conflict (many banks were closed during the combats). Finally, the role played by the reliance on labor in process of production (before the crisis) in recovery is ambiguous. On the one hand, labor-intensive firms outperformed their counterparts both during and after the crisis. On the other hand, firms relying on skilled workers and on managers were less able to rebound. These results are robust to sensitivity tests, especially alternative measures of performance (total factor productivity 2 Theoretically, the negative impact of violence may transit through three main channels: (i) supply channel (availability and cost of inputs); (ii) demand channel (contraction of demand, access to output markets); and, (iii) uncertainty (inducing firms to postpone hiring and investment decisions and adopting risk mitigating strategies). As explained in the following, we lack data to test the two latter channels. Indeed, the literature on the consequences of conflicts and violence on firms often focuses on supply channel (certainly due to lack of data). Firms suffer from limited access to inputs during conflicts, whether they are the labor (Collier and Duponchel, 2013; Ksoll et al., 2019), capital and investment (Singh, 2013) or intermediate goods (Amodio and Di Maio, 2018; Klapper et al., 2013). Ferdi P266 / Léon, F. and Dosso, I. >> Civil conflict and firm recovery... 2 and profit), alternative measure of input dependence, alternative definitions of the crisis period, and additional econometric specifications taking into account sample selection and spatial heterogeneity. Our research contributes to a burgeoning literature on the consequences of interper- sonal violence and civil conflict on firms. Recent works show that civil war and criminal acts seriously disrupt business activities by reducing the performance of surviving busi- nesses (e.g., Dupas and Robinson, 2010; Klapper et al., 2013; Amodio and Di Maio, 2018; Rozo, 2018), inducing a stronger exit (Camacho and Rodriguez, 2013), changing firm location (Blumenstock et al., 2020), reducing firm diversity (Rıos, 2019) and spurring 3 the growth of the informal sector (Bozzoli et al., 2013). However, to our knowledge, only two papers examine how firms perform in the wake of a crisis. Ksoll et al. (2019) point out that the impact of Kenya's 2008 post-electoral crisis on the flower industry was short-lived. Despite widespread worker absenteeism during the crisis, firms were able to rebound within few days. The relatively short delay in recovery is consistent with workers returning to their jobs shortly after the violence ended. Collier and Duponchel (2013), however, document that five years after the end of fighting in Sierra Leone, the business of firms located in the most affected areas still lagged.

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