Long-Term Health Effects of Malaria Exposure around Birth: Evidence from Colonial Taiwan

Simon Chang, Belton Fleisher (), Seonghoon Kim () and Shi-yung Liu

Economic Development and Cultural Change, 2014, vol. 62, issue 3, 519 - 536

Abstract: In the early twentieth century, the Japanese colonial government initiated an island-wide malaria eradication campaign in Taiwan, resulting in not only a rapid decline in malaria across time but also elimination of disparity across regions. Exploiting variations in malaria deaths caused by the campaign, we estimate causal effects of malaria exposure around birth on the health of elderly born in the colonial period. To mitigate potential biases caused by measurement errors and omitted confounders, we employ climatic factors to instrument for malaria deaths. Our findings suggest that people who were exposed to a high malaria risk around birth tend to have a higher likelihood of cardiovascular diseases and worse cognitive functions at old age.

Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/675434 (application/pdf)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/675434 (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:10.1086/675434

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 ().