Civil War, Crop Failure, and Child Stunting in Rwanda
By Richard Akresh, Philip Verwimp, Tom Bundervoet. Economic development and cultural change, 2007
352 citations recorded by the source corpus.
We combine Rwandan household survey data with event data on the timing and location of localized crop failure and armed conflict to examine the impact of these distinct shocks on children’s health status. The identification strategy exploits exogenous variation in the shocks’ geographic extent and the exposure of children’s birth cohorts to the shock. We find that in poor and nonpoor households, boys and girls born during the conflict in regions experiencing fighting are negatively affected, with height-for-age z-scores 1.05 standard deviations lower. Conversely, only girls are negatively affected by crop failure, with these girls exhibiting 0.86 standard deviations lower height-for-age z-scores, and the impact is worse for girls in poor households. Results are robust to using alternative shock exposure measures, different geographic boundary definitions for the affected regions, and household-level production and rainfall shocks as alternative measures of crop failure.
Subfields: Nutrition and Dietetics, Safety Research, Soil Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8ecb9ea34e8cdda32a504b1045a528b4a1a0ffd6
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Citations in the corpus
- Armed Conflicts and Food Insecurity: Evidence from Boko Haram's Attacks (2019, background): “Many empirical studies analyzing the impacts of armed conflicts on food security focus on the effect on the nutritional status of children, measured by anthropometric outcomes (Akresh, Verwimp, and Bundervoet 2011; Akresh, Lucchetti, and Thirumurthy 2012; Minoiu and Shemyakina 2014).”
- The human capital consequences of civil war: Evidence from Guatemala (2011, background): “Akresh et al. (2007) find a negative relationship between height-for-age z-scores and exposure to the Rwandan civil war, the effect being particularly strong for girls. In a similar paper, Akresh et al. (2009) find that an additional month of war exposure in rural Burundi decreases children’s height”