Long Run Health Repercussions of Drought Shocks: Evidence from South African Homelands / Taryn Dinkelman.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Dinkelman, Taryn.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w21440.

NBER working paper series no. w21440

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Other Title:

Long Run Health Repercussions of Drought Shocks

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2015.

Summary:

Drought is Africa's most prevalent natural disaster and is becoming an increasingly common source of income shocks around the world. This paper presents new evidence from Africa that droughts are an important component of long run variation in health human capital. I use Census data to estimate the effects of early childhood exposure to drought on later-life disabilities among South Africans confined to homelands during apartheid. By exploiting almost forty years of quasi-random variation in local droughts experienced by different cohorts in different districts, I find that drought exposure in infancy raises later-life disability rates by 3.5 to 5.2%, with effects concentrated in physical and mental disabilities, and largest for males. An exploration of spatial heterogeneity in drought effects suggests that limits to mobility imposed on homelands may have contributed to these negative effects. My findings are relevant for low-income settings where households have limited access to formal and informal coping mechanisms and face high costs of avoiding droughts through migration.

Notes:

Print version record

July 2015.