Health shocks, recovery and the first thousand days: the effect of the Second World War on height growth in Japanese children

Eric Schneider, Kota Ogasawara and Tim Cole

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: This article uses the health shock on Japanese civilians of the Second World War to understand the effects of health shocks at different developmental stages on children's long-run growth pattern and to test whether recovery is possible after an early-life health shock. We construct a prefecture-level dataset of mean heights of boys and girls aged 6–19 from 1929 to 2015. Linking the heights recorded at different ages for the same birth cohort, we measure a counterfactual causal effect of the health shocks during the Second World War on the cohort growth pattern of children. We find that the war effect was greatest for cohorts exposed to the war in late childhood and adolescence: these cohorts were 1.7–3.0 cm shorter at adulthood and had delayed pubertal growth and slower maturation than they would have had if the war had never occurred. However, there were no persistent health penalties for children exposed to the war in early life, suggesting that catch-up growth was possible as health conditions improved after the war. These findings challenge the thousand-days consensus that children cannot recover from nutritional shocks in early life and indicate that adolescence is a sensitive period for health shocks.

Keywords: child growth; health shocks; catch-up growth; nutrition; Japan; Second World War (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: N35 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 31 pages
Date: 2021-12-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea and nep-his
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published in Population and Development Review, 1, December, 2021, 47(4), pp. 1075 - 1105. ISSN: 1728-4457

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/111948/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Health Shocks, Recovery, and the First Thousand Days: The Effect of the Second World War on Height Growth in Japanese Children (2021)
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:ehl:lserod:111948

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager ().