Topic: Impacts of environmental degradation: Forest loss, malaria, and child outcomes in Nigeria
Abstract:
We investigate how environmental degradation at the very beginning of child’s life impacts childhood health. In particular, we examine the effect of forest loss around the time of birth on infant mortality and the early childhood health and nutrition of children in Nigeria. We geolink a new high-resolution data set of global forest loss (Hansen et al. 2013) to child-level data from the Nigeria Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) from 2008 and 2013 and, given that location of forest loss is potentially nonrandom and that confounding economic trends may be associated with health outcomes, we employ several estimation strategies. We include geographic fixed effects, time-region trends, and several spatially dis-aggregated, time-variant and time-invariant controls from remote sensing data, to isolate the health effects using only within-LGA variation and, in some specifications, we use mother fixed effects to control for all time-invariant characteristics at a household level. We find that forest loss is associated with an increase in infant mortality – one standard deviation of forest loss is associated with a seven to nine percent increase in the likelihood of death within the first month of life. In a separate analysis, we show that forest loss is associated with an increase in malaria incidence and, given that we have a panel of forest loss, we determine that the greatest malaria impact occurs in the year after forest loss. Combining these findings on the timing of forest loss and malaria incidence with our results on infant mortality suggests that the mechanism linking forest loss to infant death is maternal exposure to malaria when the child in utero. We also find evidence that forest loss leads to lower height-for-age among surviving children.
Biography:
Julia Berazneva joined the Middlebury Economics faculty as an Assistant Professor in the fall of 2015. Her research interests focus on the intersection of development economics and resource and environmental economics, with particular interest in human-environment interactions and sustainable development. She teaches courses in microeconomic theory and environmental economics.
Dr. Berazneva attended the United World College of the Adriatic in Duino, Italy, and Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, MA, majoring in Economics and minoring in Romance Languages. She holds an MSc degree in Development Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, UK, and a PhD in Applied Economics from Cornell University, Ithaca, NY. Her doctoral dissertation examines the use and management of on-farm natural resources in rural Sub-Saharan Africa, using household-level data she collected in western Kenya in 2011-2012.