It’s an impact filter---development deflates wars globally.
Cortright ’16 [David; May 18; Director of the Global Policy Initiative; Special Advisor for Policy Studies; Professor Emeritus of the Practice, Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies; “Linking Development and Peace: The Empirical Evidence,” https://peacepolicy.nd.edu/2016/05/18/linking-development-and-peace-the-empirical-evidence/]
The connections between development and peace are firmly supported by social science research. All the standard indicators of economic development, including per capita income, economic growth rates, levels of trade and investment, and degree of market openness, are significantly correlated with peace. Virtually every study on the causes of war finds a strong connection between low income and the likelihood of armed conflict. Economist Edward Miguel describes this link as “one of the most robust empirical relationships in the economic literature.” Irrespective of all other variables and indicators, poverty as measured by low income bears a strong and statistically significant relationship to increased risk of civil conflict.
No one has made this point more convincingly over the years than Paul Collier. He and his colleagues have shown that civil conflict is heavily concentrated in the poorest countries. The risk of civil war is strongly associated with joblessness, poverty and a general lack of development. They famously , “The key root cause of conflict is the failure of economic development.” They also make the reverse point. Raising economic growth rates and levels of per capita income may be “the single most important step that can be taken” to reduce the likelihood of armed conflict.
War is reverse development. It undermines economic well-being and reduces income levels. War may bring profit for the few, those ‘masters of war’ as Bob Dylan called them, but it creates economic misery for many. Once started, war becomes a self-sustaining system, an “economy of war” Mary Kaldor calls it in New and Old Wars, a feeding trough for profiteers, warlords and mobsters that becomes exceedingly difficult to stop.
War reduces life expectancy and destroys education and public health systems. It tears apart the social fabric. The calculates the cost of a major civil war as equivalent to more than 30 years of typical growth for a medium-size developing country. Trade levels take 20 years to recover. The negative economic impact of conflict helps to explain why countries at war are often caught in a deadly conflict trap, why the chief legacy of a civil war is another war.