The human, social and economic costs ofRwanda's Genocide have been staggering. Although thecountry has made remarkable progress over the last tenyears, especially in terms of recovering some of the groundlost on education and health, GDP per capita remains muchlower than what it would have been without the Genocide. Percapita GDP today would probably be between 25 and 30 percenthigher if the conflict had not taken place. About one fourthof the population in poverty today can be said to be poor asa result of the Genocide.This note provides a measure of theeconomic cost of the Rwanda Genocide using a technique forthe identification and correction of outliers in timeseries. Specifically, the detection of an outlier in the GDPper capita time series that can be traced to the conflictallows the estimation of the GDP losses associated with theGenocide. Outlier identification and correction, orintervention analysis, is a commonly used procedure whenworking with time series. In the absence of preciseinformation on the likely effects of a shock, analysts haverecently developed and resorted to more refined proceduresfor outlier identification and correction.
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