Malaria Eradication in the Americas: A Retrospective Analysis of Childhood Exposure

Abstract

This study uses the malaria-eradication campaigns in the United States (circa 1920), and in Brazil, Colombia and Mexico (circa 1955) to measure how much childhood exposure to malaria depresses labor productivity. The campaigns began because of advances in health technology, which mitigates concerns about reverse causality. Malarious areas saw large drops in the disease thereafter. Relative to non-malarious areas, cohorts born after eradication had higher income as adults than the preceding generation. These cross-cohort changes coincided with childhood exposure to the campaigns rather than to pre-existing trends. Estimates suggest a substantial, though not predominant, role for malaria in explaining cross-region differences in income.

Identifying National Level Education Reforms in Developing Settings: An Application to Ethiopia

“…The general policy change in an FPE reform is to remove compulsory school fees in all primary schools across the country (the extent of fee removal varies reform to reform); therefore, there is no geographic variation in the implementation of the reform itself. Previous work examining the impact of malaria eradication exploited pre-intervention levels of the disease to generate variation in the expected impact of the anti-malaria programs (Bleakley, 2010;Lucas, 2010Lucas, , 2013. The benefit to this type of strategy is that it does not depend on variation in the implementation, but the geographic component of the variation is determined solely on the pre-intervention characteristics of each geographic district.…”

Mortality versus morbidity in the demographic transition

“…If they did, they would have chosen e u t = e h t /± > e h t , that is, more investment in unhealthy children to compensate for their health shock. 12 In not following this approach, we are relying on an established literature in development economics that consistently finds evidence of intrahousehold discrimination. For example, Akresh et al's (2012) study on Burkina Faso finds that lower ability children are typically less likely to be enrolled in school and that having higher ability siblings has at least as much effect on parental quality investment.…”

The causes and consequences of demographic transition

“…While the book makes all these points there is a difficulty in establishing the magnitude of these effects since the associations seen in the data may not be causal. However there is recent evidence of large causal effects on education and earnings of eradicating malaria and improving childhood nutrition (Bleakley (2010), Hoddinott, Maluccio, Behrman, Flores et al (2008)). There is also emerging evidence of causal effects of reduction in fertility on investments in children (Schultz (2009)).…”