 Civil War, Crop Failure, and the Health Status of Young ChildrenRichard Akresh () and Philip Verwimp No 19, HiCN Working Papers from Households in Conflict Network Abstract: Economic shocks at birth have lasting impacts on children�s health several years after the shock. We calculate height for age z-scores for children under age five using data from a Rwandan nationally representative household survey conducted in 1992. We exploit district and time variation in crop failure and civil conflict to measure the impact of exogenous shocks that children experience at birth on their height several years later. We find that girls born after a shock in a region experiencing these events exhibit 0.72 standard deviations lower height for age z-scores and the impact is worse for poor households. There is no impact of these shocks on boys� health status. Results are robust to using household level production and rainfall shocks as alternative measures of crop failure. The analysis also contributes to the debate on the economic conditions prevailing on the eve of the Rwandan genocide. Keywords: Child health; economic shocks; civil war; rainfall shocks; Africa (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hic:wpaper:19 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in HiCN Working Papers from Households in Conflict Network |
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