Adult Mortality and Consumption Growth in the Age of HIV/AIDS

Kathleen Beegle, Joachim De Weerdt and Stefan Dercon ()

Economic Development and Cultural Change, 2008, vol. 56, pages 299-326

Abstract: This article uses a 13-year panel of individuals in Tanzania to assess how adult mortality shocks affect both the short- and long-run consumption growth of surviving household members. Using unique data that tracks individuals from 1991 to 2004, we examine consumption growth, controlling for a set of initial community, household, and individual characteristics; the effect is identified using the sample of households in 2004 that grew out of baseline households. We find robust evidence that an affected household will see consumption drop 7% within the first 5 years after the adult death. With high growth in the sample over this time period, this creates a 19 percentage point growth gap with the average household. There is some evidence of persistent effects of these shocks for up to 13 years, but these effects are imprecisely estimated and not significantly different from zero. The impact of female adult death is found to be particularly severe.

Date: 2008
View citations in EconPapers

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/resolve?id=doi:10.1086/522895 (text/html)

Related works:
Working Paper: Adult mortality and consumption growth in the age of HIV/AIDS (2006)
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: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ucp:ecdecc:v:56:y:2008:p:299-326

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/EDCC/order1.html

Access Statistics for this article

Economic Development and Cultural Change is edited by John Strauss

More articles in Economic Development and Cultural Change from University of Chicago Press
Address: The University of Chicago Press, Journals Division, P.O. Box 37005 Chicago, IL 60637
Series data maintained by Christopher F. Baum ().