From Revolution to Ruin: An Empirical Analysis Yemen's State Collapse

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Hauptverfasser: Ichev, Riste, Spruk, Rok
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Ichev, Riste
Spruk, Rok
author_facet Ichev, Riste
Spruk, Rok
contents We assess the broad repercussions of Yemen's 2011 revolution and subsequent civil war on its macroeconomic trajectories, human development, and quality of governance by constructing counterfactual benchmarks using a balanced panel of 37 developing countries over 1990-2022. Drawing on matrix-completion estimators with alternative shrinkage regimes and a LASSO-augmented synthetic-control method, we generate Yemen's hypothetical no-conflict paths for key macroeconomic aggregates, demographic and health indicators, and governance metrics. Across the full spectrum of methods, the conflict's outbreak corresponds with a dramatic reversal of economic and institutional development. We find that output and income experience an unprecedented contraction, investment and trade openness deteriorate sharply, and gains in life expectancy and human development are broadly reversed. Simultaneously, measures of political accountability, administrative capacity, rule of law, and corruption control collapse, reflecting systemic institutional breakdown. The concordance of results across a variety of empirical strategies attests to the robustness of our estimates.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_08512
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle From Revolution to Ruin: An Empirical Analysis Yemen's State Collapse
Ichev, Riste
Spruk, Rok
General Economics
Economics
We assess the broad repercussions of Yemen's 2011 revolution and subsequent civil war on its macroeconomic trajectories, human development, and quality of governance by constructing counterfactual benchmarks using a balanced panel of 37 developing countries over 1990-2022. Drawing on matrix-completion estimators with alternative shrinkage regimes and a LASSO-augmented synthetic-control method, we generate Yemen's hypothetical no-conflict paths for key macroeconomic aggregates, demographic and health indicators, and governance metrics. Across the full spectrum of methods, the conflict's outbreak corresponds with a dramatic reversal of economic and institutional development. We find that output and income experience an unprecedented contraction, investment and trade openness deteriorate sharply, and gains in life expectancy and human development are broadly reversed. Simultaneously, measures of political accountability, administrative capacity, rule of law, and corruption control collapse, reflecting systemic institutional breakdown. The concordance of results across a variety of empirical strategies attests to the robustness of our estimates.
title From Revolution to Ruin: An Empirical Analysis Yemen's State Collapse
topic General Economics
Economics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.08512