Public Health Effects of Natural Resource Degradation: Evidence from Indonesia

Teevrat Garg

No 169822, 2014 Annual Meeting, July 27-29, 2014, Minneapolis, Minnesota from Agricultural and Applied Economics Association

Abstract: Despite growing concern about the effect of environmental degradation on human health, little effort has been made to quantify the effect of ecosystem damage on public health indicators such as the incidence and burden of infectious diseases. Using village-level panel data and satellite data on forest cover, I find that the average within-sample deforestation results in a 2-4.5\% increase in the probability of malarial outbreak in each village in that district, translating to 360,000 - 880,000 additional infected individuals during the course of this study. The evidence is consistent with an ecological response and the effect of deforestation on malaria cannot be explained by post-deforestation land use change, anti-malarial programs or migration. The effect is specific to malaria, with deforestation having no discernible effect on other diseases (measles, respiratory infections, dengue and diarrhea) whose disease ecology differs from that of malaria. These large effects underscore that forest conservation can have local health benefits in addition to global carbon benefits.

Keywords: Environmental Economics and Policy; Health Economics and Policy; International Development; Land Economics/Use; Public Economics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-dev, nep-env and nep-sea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:aaea14:169822

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.169822

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 2014 Annual Meeting, July 27-29, 2014, Minneapolis, Minnesota from Agricultural and Applied Economics Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().