Under the Weather: Health, Schooling, and Economic Consequences of Early-Life Rainfall (original) (raw)
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Child Schooling, Child Health, and Rainfall Shocks: Evidence from Rural Vietnam
Journal of Development Studies, 2014
We study the effect of early life conditions, proxied by rainfall shocks, on schooling and height in rural Vietnam. Our measure of rainfall shock is defined as deviations from the long-run average. Many Vietnamese rural dwellers engage in rain-fed crop production, mostly irrigated paddy rice. Sufficient annual rainfall could play an important role in the harvest and thus, the household income. Nutritional deficiencies resulting from the household's income shocks may have negative consequences on health. We find that a negative rainfall shock during gestation delays school entry and slows progress through school. In addition, a negative rainfall shock in the third year of life affects adversely both schooling and height. The effects differ by region in ways that reflect differing constraints on families that are shaped by regional economic heterogeneity. We predict that policies that help rural families smooth income shocks will result in increases in human capital and in substantial cumulative returns in productivity over the life course.
Environment and Development Economics, 2020
There is growing evidence that early life conditions are important for outcomes during adolescence, including cognitive development and education. Economic conditions at the time children enter school are also important. We examine these relationships for young adolescents living in a low-income drought-prone pastoral setting in Kenya using historical rainfall patterns captured by remote sensing as exogenous shocks. Past rainfall shocks measured as deviations from local long-term averages have substantial negative effects on the cognitive development and educational achievement of girls. Results for the effects of rainfall shocks on grades attained, available for both girls and boys, support that finding. Consideration of additional outcomes suggests the effects of rainfall shocks on education are due to multiple underlying mechanisms including persistent effects on the health of children and the wealth of their households, underscoring the potential value of contemporaneous program and policy responses to such shocks.
Rainfall shocks and child health: the role of parental mental health
Climate and Development, 2020
This study examines the impacts of rainfall shocks on child health in Vietnam. It uses Young Lives data matched with province level climate data covering the period 1970-2014. Existing literature demonstrates that shocks can impact on child health by reducing household income or through the incidence of disease. This paper identifies and confirms a third mechanism: shocks impacting on parents' mental health which, in turn, reduce children's physical health. We find that one unit increase in parental mental health caused by rainfall shocks will increase the probability of a child being underweight by 0.976. Using an instrumental variable strategy, we can interpret these results as causal. We instrument parental mental health with a variable that captures whether the adult has been a victim of a crime. We also find that households that receive support, from both formal and informal channels, are less vulnerable to rainfall shocks, in terms of reducing negative health outcomes.
The weather-economy nexus has long had close attention from scholars and policy makers as weather hazards often have a significant impact on socioeconomic outcomes of populations around the world. A continuous understanding of this relationship is vital for societies to deal well with weather risk. This is particularly important in relation to climate change, which is likely to worsen the consequences of extreme weather as their frequencies and intensities increase. This thesis consists of three essays that demonstrate the adverse effects of extreme weather episodes on the local economy, using publicly available weather data and economic data sources. The essays use Indonesia setting as a case study, but the findings are likely to also be relevant for the situation in other developing countries located in the tropics that face similar socioeconomic challenges dealing with weather risk. The first essay, having identified the robust link between drought and variations of agricultural ...
Droughts are recurrent features of the Indian climatic fabric. A single month’s failure (or delay) of the annual monsoon can wield a debilitating blow—in varying degrees—to Indian agriculture and the livelihoods of people, particularly the rural populace. In 2002, large parts of the country experienced one of the most intense droughts recorded in India in the last 25 years. While losses in agricultural income and man-days of rural employment have been widely acknowledged, the long-term health consequences of the drought remain unknown. Combining Young Lives’ longitudinal data from Andhra Pradesh in India, with district-level rainfall data from the Directorate of Economics and Statistics, Government of Andhra Pradesh; this essay provides the first estimates of the long-term impact of the drought on the height attainment of a sub-sample of young individuals from below-poverty line households, who experienced this rainfall shock at the ages of 0-18 months (younger cohort), or 7-8.5 years (older cohort). This essay also examines the role of a large-scale rural poverty alleviation program—Indira Kranthi Patham—in mitigating the health impact of the drought for ‘poor’ children. Using WHO anthropometric z-scores of height-for-age as the outcome variable in static and dynamic specifications, this essay employs several estimation strategies to correct for econometric issues: first-difference estimator for solving endogeneity arising from time-invariant, unobserved heterogeneity; and an instrumental variables strategy (difference generalised method of moments, or difference GMM) to solve the endogeneity arising from lagged height-for-age scores in the dynamic specification. Our estimates indicate a loss of 0.8 standard deviations in height-for-age z-scores for the younger, drought-affected cohort of ‘poor’ children; while their older counterparts suffer a decline of 0.4 standard deviations in height-for-age z-scores. While the program under consideration had a positive and significant impact on the height-attainment of our sub-sample of ‘poor’ children, this impact is not large enough to mitigate the perils of the drought. It is hoped that these findings will not merely highlight the importance of nutrition and care in the sensitive period of early childhood, but will also bring children to the centre-stage of poverty debates in developing countries; while underlining the paramount need to protect children against shocks through welfare programs.
Impacts of prenatal and environmental factors on child growth evidence from Indonesia
2009
This paper examines the impacts of prenatal conditions and water quality on child growth using recent data from Indonesia. Our empirical results show that an increase in birthweight has significant positive effects on children’s subsequent height and weight-for-age z scores, whereas an improvement in drinking water quality, as measured by coliform bacteria count, increases the weight-for-height z score. Interestingly, there is seasonality in birthweight; this measure is significantly higher during the dry season than during the rainy season, and is also higher in a Christian-majority province than in Muslim-majority provinces, during the period shortly after Ramadan. Finally, the availability of modern water infrastructure improves the quality of drinking water. These findings show that interactions of environmental variations affect early childhood human capital formation and can have long-term impacts on their outcomes.
Climate shocks, coping responses and gender gap in human development
2020
Replication data for chapter 2: This chapter examines the impact of drought on child health and schooling outcomes and investigates the contemporaneous relationship between these two main building blocks of human capital. We merge childlevel longitudinal data from the Ethiopia Rural Socioeconomic Survey (ERSS) with geo-referenced climate data. Our findings from within-child variation estimators reveal that drought has a detrimental impact on the highest grade completed of female children. We show that the negative eect of drought on a female child's completed years of formal schooling is channelled, albeit not entirely, through ill health.
The impacts of rainfall shocks on birth weight in Vietnam
Journal of Development Effectiveness, 2021
This paper investigates the less discernible cost of rainfall shocks to birth weight outcomes within the context of Vietnam. Exploiting the variation across districts and conception months-years, we show that in-utero exposure to excessive and deficient rainfall shocks in the second trimester of pregnancy reduces child's weight at birth by 3.5 and 3.1%, respectively. Besides, infants born to poor, rural, and low educated mothers are especially vulnerable to the adverse repercussions of rainfall shocks. Since poor infant health can leave persistent effects over the life cycle, the study calls for more efforts in intervention measures to mitigate the impacts of rainfall shocks. Additional attention should be given to children and women from disadvantaged backgrounds as this group is the most vulnerable.
E3S Web of Conferences
Chronic malnutrition (Stunting) is one of the most serious health problems in Indonesia. Almost 8.9 million or 37.2 % of all Indonesian children under 5 were stunted in 2013. The negative impact as a result of stunting in early of life associated with high mortality, decrease cognitive development, poor school performance, and reduce productivity as adults. Stunting associated with long-term nutrition intake and the burden of diseases. Around 56 % of malnutrition is associated with inadequate water, sanitation and hygiene. Conversely Investing to increase safe drinking water and proper sanitation provides many benefits for eliminating stunting. This paper analyzes how a poor water and sanitation affect a child’s stunting in Indonesia. Using logistic regression methods and large-scale data from the Indonesia Family Life Survey (IFLS) 2014, we selected 2835 children aged 0-5 years old in 2014 who considered stunting. The study finds that they are significantly associated between prope...