Land reform and child health in the Kyrgyz Republic

Katrina Kosec and Olga Shemyakina

No 1904, IFPRI discussion papers from International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI)

Abstract: Does the establishment of private property rights to land improve child health and nutrition outcomes? We exploit a natural experiment in the Kyrgyz Republic following the collapse of socialism, whereby the government rapidly liquidated state and collective farms containing 75 percent of agricultural land and distributed it to individuals, providing 99-year transferrable use rights. We use household surveys collected before, during, and after the privatization reform and spatial variation in its timing to identify its health and nutrition impacts. We find that young children aged 0-5 exposed to land privatization for longer periods of time accumulated significantly greater gains in height and weight, both critical measures of long-term health and nutrition. Health improvements appear to be driven by increases in consumption of home-produced food—suggesting that increased private control over household production may translate into increased consumption and thus health dividends for young children.

Keywords: human capital; agrarian reform; child nutrition; health; child health; land ownership; nutrition; children; private ownership; land reform; land; Kyrgyzstan; Central Asia; Asia (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cis and nep-tra
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https://hdl.handle.net/10568/147341

Related works:
Journal Article: Land Reform and Child Health in the Kyrgyz Republic (2024)
Working Paper: Land Reform and Child Health in The Kyrgyz Republic (2018)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fpr:ifprid:1904

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