The fortune of birth at the right time—The longterm effects of the 2008 food and economic crisis on child health

Kornher, Lukas / Awudu Abdulai / Muhammed Usman
External Publications (2023)

Conference Paper, Glasgow: Royal Economic Society

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Conditions in early life have impacts on future health outcomes, educational attainments, and labor productivity. High international food and fuel prices have triggered another global food crisis similar to the global food crisis 2007/2008. Using the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHSs) and the Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys of 12 African countries, we analyze the medium to long-term effects of the food price shocks of 2007/08 on the nutritional status of children aged 6-to-59 months. To compare children from different cohorts, we estimate country and sex-specific growth reference curves based on earlier and later rounds of the DHSs to address the age at measurement bias of anthropometric z-scores. The results show a negative and statistically significant effect of the in-utero exposure to the global food crisis on child height of averagely around-0.05 standard deviations which increases to around-0.08 standard deviations at lower levels of nutritional status. The effect size, however, varies across the study countries and is between. 01 to-0.16 standard deviations. The coefficient estimate is negative and significant in eight out of 12 countries for the entire country sample and negative and significant for at least one sub group in each country. The findings reveal that asset poor households were particularly affected by the price shock but we do not find a systematic difference between agricultural and non-agricultural households. The model specifications control for geographical effects, a household’s socioeconomic factors, maternal and child characteristics and we provide several robustness checks including a differences-in-differences.