The long run impact of severe shocks in childhood: Evidence from the Ethiopian famine of 1984

In 1984, the world was shocked at the scale of a famine in Ethiopia that caused up to a million deaths. The crisis was brought on by drought from repeated rainfall failure, poor economic policies and civil war. But what of the survivors? This paper estimates the longterm impact of the famine twenty years later, on young men and women who experienced this severe shock as small children during the crisis. The data show considerable heterogeneity in experiences in famine intensityaround three quarters of our sample had to cut back on quantities of food eaten, and of those, a third ate only one meal a day. We model adult health outcomes as a function of childhood inputs using a 2-period model of childhood development grounded in the human capital and nutrition literature, and identify the impact of the shock during “critical” or sensitive periods in childhood. We then examine height-for-age z scores at an intermediate stage ten years after the famine as an indicator for nutrition progress. At that point, children exposed to the famine aged 1-3 are shorter in comparison to those exposed as older children, and those born after the famine. The results indicate the possibility of limited catchup. We discuss the robustness of the results, including endogeneity of the shock, and positive and negative sample selection from survival and migration respectively. * Corresponding address: St Antony’s College, Oxford, OX2 6JF Email: [email protected] I would like to thank Stefan Dercon for access to and guidance with the use and analysis of this dataset, also Sonia Bhalotra and seminar participants at the CSAE, Oxford for helpful comments. The data used in this paper was collected by the University of Addis Ababa, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), and the Centre for the Study of African Economies (CSAE). Funding for the survey was provided by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), the Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA) and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).