The Human Capital Cost of Landmine Contamination in Cambodia

Ouarda Merrouche ()

No 25, HiCN Working Papers from Households in Conflict Network

Abstract: The International Campaign to Ban Landmines production and use estimates that there are more than 80 billion landmines in the ground in more than 80 countries. Despite the scale of the problem and large investments by OECD countries to clear mines in low income countries, the economic consequences of landmine contamination have been so far unexamined by economists working on the economics of wars, perhaps due to the lack of data thus far. Using unique data from Cambodia, this paper estimates the effect of landmine contamination on human capital. These effects are identified using difference-in-differences (DD) and instrumental variables (IV) estimators. In the DD framework I exploit two sources of variation in an individual�s exposure to the conflict: her age in 1970 due to the spread of landmines over time and landmine contamination intensity in her district of birth. The IV specification uses the distance to the Thai border as an exogenous source of variation in landmine contamination intensity. The IV estimate indicates a education loss of 0.4 years at the mean and no visible effect on earnings. I discuss three factors that probably drive down the returns to education in post-war Cambodia: (1) The downgrading of educated people during the Khmer rouge regime (2) Direct Effects of landmines on the returns to education (3) the destruction of physical capital and technological delay through capital-skill complementarity.

Pages: 28 pages
Date: 2006-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev and nep-hrm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (18)

Downloads: (external link)
https://hicn.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/wp25.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:hic:wpaper:25

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in HiCN Working Papers from Households in Conflict Network
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tilman Brück () and () and () and ().