The Long-term Health Effects of Fetal Malnutrition: Evidence from the 1959-1961 China Great Leap Forward Famine

Seonghoon Kim (), Belton Fleisher () and Jessica Ya Sun ()
Additional contact information
Jessica Ya Sun: Huazhong University

No 9093, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: We report evidence of long-term adverse health impacts of in utero exposure to malnutrition based on survivors in their 50s who were born during the China Famine that occurred in the years 1959-1961. We take advantage of recently available data provided by the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS) to corroborate evidence supporting the Fetal Origin Hypothesis. We find that fetal exposure to malnutrition has large and long-lasting impacts on both physical health and cognitive abilities, including the risks of suffering a stroke, physical disabilities in speech, walking and vision, and measures of mental acuity. Our findings on the health impacts of fetal malnutrition on middle-age survivors suggest that it would be desirable to trace the changes of health status of the famine survivors as they age into later life stages. We suspect that such further study would support the lifetime benefits of in utero and early infancy health interventions that extend through the life cycle in the form of avoiding both physical and mental impairment.

Keywords: health; fetal origin hypothesis; malnutrition; China Famine (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I10 I12 J14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 28 pages
Date: 2015-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cna, nep-hea, nep-neu and nep-sea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published - published in: Health Economics, 2017, 26 (10), 1264 - 1277

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp9093.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The Long‐term Health Effects of Fetal Malnutrition: Evidence from the 1959–1961 China Great Leap Forward Famine (2017)
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:iza:izadps:dp9093

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().