Live aid revisited: long-term impacts of the 1984 Ethiopian famine on children

In 1984, the world was shocked at the scale of a famine in Ethiopia that caused over half a million deaths, making it one of the worst in recent history. The mortality impacts are clearly significant. But what of the survivors? This paper provides the first estimates the long-term impact of the famine twenty years later, on the height of young adults aged 17–25 who experienced this severe shock in-utero and as infants during the crisis. Improving methodologically on other studies of famines across the world, famine intensity is measured at the household level, while impacts are assessed using a difference-in-differences comparison across siblings. Specifically, our empirical strategy compares siblings across cohorts exposed to the famine at critical periods before and after birth, and allows us to control for fixed heterogeneity correlated with famine exposure. We find that by adulthood, children who were under the age of 36 months at the peak of the crisis are significantly shorter than the older cohort who were at a less vulnerable age, by at least 3cm. We also find that affected children are less likely to have completed primary school, and are more likely to have experienced recent illness. Indicative calculations show that this may lead to income losses of at least 3% per year over their lifetime directly linked to height loss, and possibly 8% per year accounting for losses due to lower human capital accumulation. The evidence also suggests that the relief operations at the time appear to have made little difference.