Riot

"An exploration of the association between fuel subsidies and fuel riots", World Development

Published
Authors

In recent years, dozens of countries have been rocked by riots, often associated with popular demand for fuel.  A paper, published today in World Development, by The Policy Practice Director Neil McCulloch (and co-authors Davide Natalini, Noami Hossain and Patricia Justino) uses a new international dataset on fuel riots to explore the effects of fuel prices and price regimes on fuel riots.   Unsurprisingly, we find that large domestic fuel price shocks - often linked to international price shocks - are a key driver of riots.   But we also show that fuel riots are closely associated with domestic price regimes. Countries that maintain fixed price regimes – often net energy exporters - tend to have large fuel subsidies. When such subsidies become unsustainable, domestic price adjustments are large, often leading to riots.

The full article is available Open Access here.