Wars and child health: Evidence from the Eritrean–Ethiopian conflict

Abstract

Conflict between and within countries can have lasting health and economic consequences, but identifying such effects can be empirically challenging. This paper uses household survey data from Eritrea to estimate the effect of exposure to the 1998–2000 Eritrea-Ethiopia war on children’s health. The identification strategy exploits exogenous variation in the conflict’s geographic extent and timing and the exposure of different birth cohorts to the fighting. The unique survey data include details on each household’s migration history, which allows us to measure a child’s geographic location during the war and without which war exposure would be incorrectly classified. War-exposed children have lower height-for-age Z-scores, with similar effects for children born before or during the war. Both boys and girls who are born during the war experience negative impacts due to conflict. Effects are robust to including region-specific time trends, alternative conflict exposure measures, and mother fixed effects.

Extreme Weather Events and Child Height: Evidence from Mongolia

“…Thus, our analysis bridges and contributes to related fields of research on household strategies to cope with shocks (e.g., Cameron and Worswick 2003;Carter et al 2007;Carter and Maluccio 2003;Takasaki et al 2004) and on the effects of food aid (e.g., Quisumbing 2003;Yamano et al 2005). In contrast, many existing studies on the impact of shocks on child anthropometrics use Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) (Akresh et al 2012a;Akresh et al 2012b;Rabassa et al 2014;Tiwari et al 2013). The limitation of DHS data is that a standardized questionnaire is employed, which records few information on the socio-economic characteristics of households and their exposure to shocks.…”

“…Moreover, children of victimized households living in conflict-affected regions and who were born during the war suffered the most severe consequences. Bundervoet, Verwimp and Akresh (2009) (Akresh et al 2012b), the Rwandan civil war (Akresh et al 2011), the Nigerian Biafra war (Akresh et al 2012a), and the al-Aqsa Intifada (Mansour and Rees 2012).…”

Growing-up Unfortunate: War and Human Capital in Ethiopia

“…Most of the battles took place in the Tigray region. Akresh, Lucchetti et al (2012) argue that both countries claimed sovereignty over these three areas of war due to the confusion over the border demarcation between the two countries.…”

“…Similarly, Bundervoet, Verwimp, and Akresh (2009) find a 0.35 standard deviation (and a 0.047 standard deviation for each additional month of conflict exposure) lower heightfor-age z-score for those exposed to civil war in rural Burundi. A study by Akresh, Lucchetti, and Thirumurthy (2012) that is closely related to this paper uses the 2002 cross-sectional Eritrean Development and Health Survey (DHS) to investigate the impact of the Ethiopian-Eritrean war on child heightfor-age z-score, exploiting exogenous variation in geographic extent and timing of conflict. They find that exposure to war decreases child height-for-age z-score by about 0.45 standard deviations.…”

The impact of extreme weather events on education

“…3 To the best of our knowledge, there are only two studies that also use pre-shock information on location (Akresh, Lucchetti and Thirumurthy 2012;Deuchert and Felfe 2015). 4 See Currie (2009) and Almond and Currie (2011) for a review of the empirical economic literature on the impact of earlylife conditions on adult health.…”