Mines: The local wealth and health effects of mineral mining in developing countries
By J. Goltz, P. Barnwal. Journal of Development Economics, 2019
145 citations recorded by the source corpus.
We assess health and wealth impacts of mineral mining using micro-data from about 800 mines in 44 developing countries. Gains in asset wealth (0.3 standard deviations) coexist with a higher incidence of health conditions linked to heavy metal toxicity: anemia among women (ten percentage points), and stunting in young children (five percentage points). Consistent results emerge from a range of distinct identification strategies. Two difference-in-difference tests exploit information on mineral and pollutant characteristics to show that the observed health effects are due to pollution: impacts arise only near mines where metal contamination is to be expected, and the recovery of blood hemoglobin levels in women after childbirth shows a characteristic signature of lead toxicity. Our results add to the nascent literature on health-wealth tradeoffs near industrial operations in developing countries.
Subfields: Building and Construction, Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0f96865cf1ff74a916aaa102c71c45b2aad17b40
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Building and Construction
In Sociology and Political Science
Citations in the corpus
- Towards nexus-based governance: defining interactions between economic activities and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (2020, background): “…pollution, including via particulate and gas emissions, is also associated with mining and quarrying activities, posing a threat to human health [3.9] (Fugiel et al. 2017), especially to those living near mining areas (Fernández-Navarro et al. 2012; Hendryx 2015; von der Goltz and Barnwal 2019).”