The Medium- and Long-Term Health and Human Capital Consequences of Natural Disasters. Evidence from Indonesia.

Details

Supervisors

Vandenberghe, Vincent

Faculty

Faculté des sciences économiques, sociales, politiques et de communication

Degree label

Master [120] en sciences économiques, orientation générale

Abstract

How sensitive is medium- and long-run individual health to environmental conditions in childhood? Adverse environmental shocks in the post-weaning period can have lasting effects on an individual’s health and human capital outcomes. By merging natural disaster data at the province-level with an individual-level dataset on children’s education and socio-economic factors, I create a proxy for negative external shocks during childhood with natural hazard events to evaluate their effect on Indonesian children’s later life outcomes, especially in rural areas. While, the impact of long-run consequences of an early childhood disaster experience on the overall population remains ambiguous, there is an adverse relation with adult health and human capital outcomes for the rural population. In the medium term, I find negative and persistent effects on children’s education, but little effect on their health. The regression-based evidence suggests that improved policies aimed at protecting households, particularly in rural regions, against environmental shocks could save large amounts in social costs in the long run.