Professor Jean-Louis Arcand will lead the upcoming research seminar on Thursday, January 29th, at 12:30 p.m. He will discuss the economic costs of war, with a focus on the case of Gaza.

Abstract: 

We map and estimate the economic impact of the Israel-Hamas war on the Gaza Strip that began after the 7 October 2023 attacks by Palestinian militant groups.  We measure the extent of likely damage to Gaza's built environment derived from satellite radar time series data and estimate the impact caused by the conflict on Gazan economic activity via night-time luminosity measurements.  After the first year of war, we find that 82% of each square kilometer of the Gaza Strip had been damaged at least once.  We estimate an average loss of night-time luminosity due to the conflict of 68.5%, and find that the November 2023 ceasefire coincided with a small but significant increase in luminosity.  We translate our night-time luminosity losses into economic indicators: our results show that more than three quarters of Gaza's economy has been destroyed since the start of the conflict, and we estimate a loss of 2.6 billion USD of household expenditures caused by the damage.  Our work establishes a novel framework for estimating the economic impact caused by conflicts with low latency, detailed spatial resolution and which is agnostic with respect to field data sourced from political actors.