Working Paper: NBER ID: w21440
Authors: Taryn Dinkelman
Abstract: Drought is Africa’s most prevalent natural disaster and is becoming an increasingly common source of income shocks around the world. This paper presents new evidence from Africa that droughts are an important component of long run variation in health human capital. I use Census data to estimate the effects of early childhood exposure to drought on later-life disabilities among South Africans confined to homelands during apartheid. By exploiting almost forty years of quasi-random variation in local droughts experienced by different cohorts in different districts, I find that drought exposure in infancy raises later-life disability rates by 3.5 to 5.2%, with effects concentrated in physical and mental disabilities, and largest for males. An exploration of spatial heterogeneity in drought effects suggests that limits to mobility imposed on homelands may have contributed to these negative effects. My findings are relevant for low-income settings where households have limited access to formal and informal coping mechanisms and face high costs of avoiding droughts through migration.
Keywords: drought; health; human capital; South Africa; disability
JEL Codes: I15; N37; O13; O15; Q54
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| drought exposure in infancy (Q54) | disability rates (J14) |
| drought exposure during early years (Q54) | disability rates (J14) |
| drought exposure during early years (males) (J79) | disability rates (J14) |
| drought exposure in TBVC areas (Q15) | disability rates (J14) |