Working Paper: CEPR ID: DP9033
Authors: Stefan Dercon; Catherine Porter
Abstract: In 1984, the world was shocked at the scale of a famine in Ethiopia that caused over half a million deaths, making it one of the worst in recent history. The mortality impacts are clearly signi cant. But what of the survivors? This paper provides the first estimates the long-term impact of the famine twenty years later, on the height of young adults aged 19-22 years who experienced this severe shock as infants during the crisis. An innovative feature of the analysis is that famine intensity is measured at the household level, while impacts are assessed using a di fference-in-di fferences comparison across siblings, and compared with an IV cross-section, using rainfall as an instrument for the shock. We find that by adulthood, a ffected children who were aged of 12-36 months at the peak of the crisis are signi cantly shorter than the older cohort, and their una ffected peers, by at least 5cm. There are no signi ficant e ffects on those in utero during the crisis, and we cannot rule out that for this cohort, the selectione ffect dominates scarring. Indicative calculations show that for the aff ected group such height loss may lead to income losses of around 5% per year over their lifetime. The evidence also suggests that the relief operations at the time made little di fference.
Keywords: Ethiopia; Famine; Human Development
JEL Codes: I12; J13; O12; O15
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| famine exposure during critical developmental periods (O15) | lifetime income losses (J17) |
| drought shock (Q54) | famine exposure during critical developmental periods (O15) |
| famine exposure during critical developmental periods (O15) | adult height (I15) |
| unobserved household characteristics (D19) | famine exposure during critical developmental periods (O15) |