How Peace Saves Lives: Evidence from Colombia

Perilla, Sergio; Prem, Mounu; Purroy, Miguel E.; Vargas, Juan F.

doi:10.2139/ssrn.3977483

Cited by 1 publication

(2 citation statements)

References 39 publications

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“…Second, we contribute to the literature on how mobility barriers affect healthcare access and imply a sub-optimal distribution of health resources (including HCWs, see e.g., Syed et al, 2013). Finally, we add to the existing studies on the socio-economic effects of conflict termination, and in particular on that of the intended and unintended consequences of Colombia's peace agreement (Prem et al, 2020Guerra-Cújar et al, 2024;de Roux and Martinez, 2021;Bernal et al, 2024;Perilla et al, 2024).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 98%

“…Moreover, -albeit unrelated to lifting mobility constraints-conflict victimization and the damage of key healthcare infrastructure (see, e.g. Parada et al, 2023) imply that, on the one hand, conflict termination likely reduces healthcare demand for violence-related injuries (Perilla et al, 2024) and, on the other hand, post-conflict reconstruction investments could increase the number of healthcare providers and therefore the demand for HCWs (Kruk et al, 2010).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Health Workforce Reallocation in the Aftermath of Conflict: Evidence from Colombia

Mora,

Prem,

Rodriguez-Lesmes

et al. 2024

Preprint

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Healthcare workers are in great deficit worldwide, especially in rural and vulnerable areas of developing countries. By leveraging a permanent ceasefire that ended over five decades of armed conflict between the Colombian government and the FARC insurgency, we study the extent to which conflict termination affected the health workforce gap between areas more exposed to FARC violence and other places. Based on individual-level administrative records of all healthcare workers in Colombia and a difference-in-differences strategy, we find that the ceasefire caused a differential 11.4% decrease in the share of employed healthcare workers per 1,000 people in places more exposed to FARC violence relative to the rest of the country. We find a stronger decrease among healthcare workers with less human capital levels and open-ended labor contracts. We show that this effect is likely explained by lifting mobility restrictions in previously violent areas, and document that, because the net reduction in healthcare workers increased the within-municipality share of (more productive) physicians, it did not translate into a deterioration of mortality rates or healthcare service provision.

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