Fighting against Malaria: Prevent Wars while Waiting for the “Miraculous” Vaccine

Abstract

The World Health Organization estimates that 300 million clinical cases of malaria occur annually and observed that during the 80's and part of the 90's its incidence increased. In this paper we explore the in uence of refugees from civil wars on the incidence of malaria in the refugee-receiving countries. Using civil wars as an instrumental variable we show that for each 1,000 refugees there are between 2,000 and 2,700 cases of malaria in the refugee receiving country. On average 13% of the cases of malaria reported by the WHO are caused by forced migration as a consequence of civil wars.

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

“…Next, a double difference analysis is used to suggest the existence of beneficial effects on local residents through a fall in household's expenditures on food products and a positive change in some of their welfare indicators. In contrast, a second related work by Montalvo and Reynal-Querol (2007) finds that the arrival of refugees has had harmful impacts on health and the burden of death in recipient countries by increasing their transmission and persistence of malaria. The authors gathered macro data to construct a long panel for 135 countries and performed several specifications and robustness checks (including instrumental variable estimates) to argue that each 1,000 additional refugees were connected to between 2,000 and 2,700 new cases of malaria in host countries.…”

Population Size and Civil Conflict Risk: Is there a Causal Link?

“…One of the reasons for this large difference between IV and least squares estimate is that civil conflict has a large negative effect on population size because of battle casualties, the spread of disease, and masses of refugee movements that set in even before warfare activity has fully escalated (Davenport, Moore, and Poe, 2003;Ghobarah, Huth and Russeth, 2003;Montalvo and Reynal-Querol, 2007). A least squares estimate will therefore suffer from substantial downward bias.…”

“…Fearon and Laitin (2003) estimate that since the end of World War II civil conflicts have caused more than 16.2 million battle casualties. Many more people have been killed or disabled in civil conflict as a result of strategic violence against the civilian population and the spread of lethal diseases (Ghobarah, Huth and Russeth, 2003;Montalvo and Reynal-Querol, 2007). …”

Economic Conditions of the States Before and After the American Civil War

“…Soares (2006) estimates the consequences of violence in terms of life-expectancy and as a percentage of GDP. Montalvo and Reynal-Querol (2007) examine the impacton the incidence of malaria in countries receiving refugees from civil war countries. Based on a cross-country analysis, Przeworski et al (2000) find that five-year average economic growth following a war is 5.98% per year.…”