Civil wars beyond their borders: The human capital and health consequences of hosting refugees

Abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in Civil Wars beyond their Borders: The Human Capital and Health Consequences of Hosting RefugeesJavier E. Baez Between 1993 and 1994, extremist militia groups carried out the extermination of ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus in the genocides of Burundi and Rwanda. Nearly one million people were killed and thousands were forcibly uprooted from their homes. Over the course of a few months, Kagera -a region in northwestern Tanzania -received more than 500,000 refugees from these wars. This region is home to a series of geographic natural barriers, which resulted in variation in refugee intensity. I exploit this variation to investigate the short and long run causal effects of hosting refugees on the outcomes of local children. Reducedform estimates offer evidence of adverse impacts almost 1.5 years after the shock: a worsening of children's anthropometrics of 0.3 standard deviations, an increase of 15 to 20 percentage points in the incidence of infectious diseases and an increase of roughly 7 percentage points in mortality for children under five. I also exploit intra-and inter-cohort variation and find that childhood exposure to this massive arrival of refugees reduced height in early adulthood by 1.8 cm (1.2%), schooling by 0.2 years (7.1%) and literacy by 7 percentage points (8.6%). Designs using the distance from the village to the border with Rwanda as an alternative instrumental strategy for refugee intensity support the findings. The estimates are robust across a variety of samples, specifications and estimation methods and provide evidence of a previously undocumented indirect effect of civil wars on the well-being of children and subsequent economic growth in refugee-hosting communities. D I S C U S S I O N P A P E R S E R I E S JEL Classification:O10, O12, O15

Winners and Losers among a Refugee-Hosting Population

“…It represents between 31 and 29 percent of the population in Kagera. Despite these concerns, our results are robust to the use of either the reported presence of refugees or the district dummies used by Baez (2010). 15 The RI index is a time-varying and village-specific variable, that takes the value zero for 1991 (when there is no refugee) and a continuous value for 2004.…”

“…Furthermore, a new refugee policy implemented by the Tanzanian government restricted the movement of the refugees to 4 kilometers around the camps. 6 These movement restrictions, coupled with geographical features limiting the spatial spread of the impact (Baez, 2010), provides an exceptional framework for distinguishing refugee-hosting areas from others.…”

“…14 Baez (2010) uses the fact of belonging to the districts of Ngara and Karagwe as an identification. This raises concerns as it may capture a district-specific unobserved effect rather than the effects of the refugees.…”

“…We are also concerned that an excessively large scale of analysis will capture unobserved and time-variant regional effects. Another related paper is the one by Baez (2010) who assesses the short-and long-term effects of hosting refugees on the health conditions of children. Baez offers evidence of adverse impacts, almost 1.5 years after the shock, on children's health.…”

The impact of Syrian refugees on the labor market in neighboring countries: empirical evidence from Jordan

“…Baez (2011) notes that developing countries receiving a sudden and large number of refugees from neighboring countries may face the problem of overpopulation, which leads to higher competition for resources in the host country. De Groot (2010) mentions that neighboring countries suffering from the spillover effects of conflict are likely to host the bulk of refugees, which negatively influences economic growth through the destruction of productive labor.…”