The Impact of Human Capital on the Civil Wars Considering the Role of Democracy: A Panel Generalized Least Squares Approach

Over the past two hundred years, not only the process of democracy formation has not been uniform; but also it has been with different fluctuations, including internal and external wars and conflicts. Within the system of interactions between education and the occurrence of internal conflicts in a country, the question is whether increase in the level of democracy reduces the occurrence of internal conflict or not. This study uses a panel data with 11 periods (of five years), and 83 selected war-torn countries to examine the relationship between human capital and domestic war (conflict), taking into consideration the effectiveness of democracy in this relationship. To estimate the magnitude of relationships between variables, a panel generalized least squares method is applied. Results indicate a significant negative relationship among human capital, GDP, democracy, and internal conflict. In addition, with inclusion of the interactional variable (democracy multiplied by human capital) in the model, the results show a declining progressive negative effect of both democracy and human capital on the occurrence of conflicts.