Children at Risk: The Effect of Crop Loss on Child Health in Rural Mexico

Maren Michaelsen () and Songuel Tolan

No 376, Ruhr Economic Papers from RWI - Leibniz-Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung, Ruhr-University Bochum, TU Dortmund University, University of Duisburg-Essen

Abstract: This study investigates the effect of an economic shock due to crop loss on health outcomes of children in rural Mexico. Data from the Mexican Family Life Survey for the years 2002 and 2005 off er retrospective information on economic shocks since 1997 and height-for-age z-scores (HAZ) to measure long-term effects on child health. Since crop losses are exogenous to the children, simple OLS regressions are used to estimate the effect of crop loss overall and over time. Children who were hit by crop loss have on average 0.4 standard deviations smaller HAZ two and three years after the shock than other children. For boys and children aged 25 to 60 months being hit by crop loss also increases the probability of being stunted by 20 and 27 percentage points, respectively. The findings demonstrate that, albeit its large poverty reduction programs, Mexico has to invest more to combat poverty and provide mechanisms to help households to cope with sudden economic losses.

Keywords: economic shock; crop loss; child health; Mexico (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I15 J13 Q12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/67121/1/73086992X.pdf (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:zbw:rwirep:376

DOI: 10.4419/86788431

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Ruhr Economic Papers from RWI - Leibniz-Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung, Ruhr-University Bochum, TU Dortmund University, University of Duisburg-Essen Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().