War and Children's Mortality

Abstract

This article examines the impact of war on young children's mortality in a sample of 137 countries. Years recently at war (1990-5) interact with years previously at war (1946-89) to elevate children's mortality rates (1995). Religious composition (percentage Christian and percentage Muslim) also interacts with years recently at war to reduce the effect of war on children's mortality rates. Controlling for women's literacy and access to safe water completely eliminates the effect of years previously at war, but not years recently at war.

Military Famine, Human Rights, and Child Hunger

“…Military spending is detrimental, presumably coming at the expense of investments in social programs and other measures that meet basic needs. Expanding previous studies showing long-term detrimental effects of major armed conflict and ''food wars'' on hunger and economic and social development (Messer, Cohen, and D'Costa 1998;Carlton-Ford, Hamill, and Houston 2000;Carlton-Ford 2005), we also found that wars had short-term detrimental effects, and containing these conflicts was beneficial to the human security of developing countries. Among our more important findings is the effect of gender equity.…”

“…Armed conflicts in terms of civil wars and geno/politicides contribute to child hunger (Jenkins and Scanlan 2001;Scanlan and Jenkins 2001;Scanlan 2003Scanlan , 2004. Related literature shows that interstate and internal war contribute to child mortality, largely due to negative war effects on women's literacy and general access to safe water (Carlton-Ford, Hamill, and Houston 2000;Carlton-Ford 2005).…”

Child Mortality Estimation: Appropriate Time Periods for Child Mortality Estimates from Full Birth Histories

“…This is a problem for models that use aggregated child mortality measures, such as attempts to create models of the relationship between gross domestic product per capita and child mortality for countries (e.g., [12],[13]) or models that aim to describe the relationship between conflict and child mortality levels (e.g., [14],[15]), but not for models focusing on finding covariates for individual child deaths.…”

“…The distortion of the estimates is a problem that pertains not only to the shape of the trend lines of the mortality measures, but also—as the literature within economics indicates—to the issue that the coefficients of models based on the long time periods may be biased [11] , in a way that is similar to misspecification error or ecological fallacy. This is a problem for models that use aggregated child mortality measures, such as attempts to create models of the relationship between gross domestic product per capita and child mortality for countries (e.g., [12] , [13] ) or models that aim to describe the relationship between conflict and child mortality levels (e.g., [14] , [15] ), but not for models focusing on finding covariates for individual child deaths.…”

Civil War and Life Chances

“…Cambodia, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Liberia) appear either to have improved less or to have worsened (Stewart et al, 2001a). Similarly, mortality rates for young children are higher in countries with wars than in other countries, even after controlling for changes in both foreign debt and in national wealth (Carlton-Ford, 2004a), for differences in religious composition, military participation, women's literacy and access to safe water (Carlton-Ford, 2005;Carlton-Ford et al, 2000), or for health spending, urban growth, income inequality, education, political structure, ethnic composition and differences in climate (e.g. Fearon and Laitin, 2003).…”