EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Civil War, Crop Failure, and Child Stunting in Rwanda

Richard Akresh (), Philip Verwimp and Tom Bundervoet

Economic Development and Cultural Change, 2011, vol. 59, issue 4, 777 - 810

Abstract: We combine Rwandan household survey data with event data on the timing and location of localized crop failure and armed conflict to examine the impact of these distinct shocks on children's health status. The identification strategy exploits exogenous variation in the shocks' geographic extent and the exposure of children's birth cohorts to the shock. We find that in poor and nonpoor households, boys and girls born during the conflict in regions experiencing fighting are negatively affected, with height-for-age z-scores 1.05 standard deviations lower. Conversely, only girls are negatively affected by crop failure, with these girls exhibiting 0.86 standard deviations lower height-for-age z-scores, and the impact is worse for girls in poor households. Results are robust to using alternative shock exposure measures, different geographic boundary definitions for the affected regions, and household-level production and rainfall shocks as alternative measures of crop failure.

Date: 2011
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (177)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/660003 (application/pdf)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/660003 (text/html)
Access to the online full text or PDF requires a subscription.

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:ucp:ecdecc:doi:10.1086/660003

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Economic Development and Cultural Change from University of Chicago Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Journals Division ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-20
Handle: RePEc:ucp:ecdecc:doi:10.1086/660003