Famine at birth: long-term health effects of the 1974-75 Bangladesh famine

Shaikh M.S.U. Eskander and Edward Barbier

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

Abstract: We use childhood exposure to disasters as a natural experiment inducing variations in adulthood outcomes. Following the fetal origin hypothesis, we hypothesize that children from households with greater famine exposure will have poorer health outcomes. Employing a unique dataset from Bangladesh, we test this hypothesis for the 1974-75 famine that was largely caused by increased differences between the price of coarse rice and agricultural wages, together with the lack of entitlement to foodgrains for daily wage earners. People from northern regions of Bangladesh were unequally affected by this famine that spanned several months in 1974 and 1975. We find that children surviving the 1974-75 famine have lower health outcomes during their adulthood. Due to the long-lasting effects of such adverse events and their apparent human capital and growth implications, it is important to enact and enforce public policies aimed at ameliorating the immediate harms of such events through helping the poor.

Keywords: Bangladesh; fetal origin hypothesis; health; long-term effects; the 1974-75 Bangladesh famine (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I31 O15 Q54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 21 pages
Date: 2024-12-20
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-env, nep-hea and nep-his
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published in Environment and Development Economics, 20, December, 2024. ISSN: 1355-770X

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/126622/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

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:ehl:lserod:126622

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 ().