Essays on disease, human capital, and economic growth

• Main Author: Lucas, Adrienne M
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Published: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses 01.01.2006
• Subjects: Absenteeism; Anemia; Birth weight; Children & youth; Copyright; Costs; Decision making; Economic growth; Economics; Education; Educational attainment; Epidemics; Families & family life; Fertility; Funding; Hospitals; Human capital; Hypoglycemia; Identification; Illnesses; Infections; Malaria; Mortality; Nutrition; Parasites; Parasitic diseases; Pregnancy; Public health; Regions; School attendance; Snow; Students; Studies; Womens health
• ISBN: 0542820633; 9780542820632

Between 1940 and 1960, a massive international public health campaign largely eliminated malaria from an area that was home to one-fifth of the world's population. I use this intervention as a quasi-experiment to estimate malaria's effect on a human capital, fertility, and child survival. By combining pre-existing geographic variations in malarial intensity and the national anti-malaria public health interventions, I first estimate malaria's effect on female educational attainment. Separate estimates using data from Paraguay, Sri Lanka, and Trinidad indicate the decline in malaria explains approximately 53% of the increase in the years of female education in the malarious regions and 35% of the increase in female literacy. Based on the these estimates and current malaria incidence, I predict increases in completed schooling of 0.11 to 0.56 years (with corresponding increases in steady state per capita GDP of 1.2% to 7.5%) if malaria eradication occurred in thirteen African countries with the highest reported malaria endemicity. Using detailed data for Sri Lanka I identify the timing of malaria's effect on female educational attainment. While malaria can effect human capital accumulation throughout infancy, childhood, and adolescence, I find malarial intensity has the largest impact on eventual educational outcomes during the first three years of life. Using this result I estimate the effect of malaria on total educational attainment. The estimates suggest that every ten percentage point decrease in the malaria spleen rate, a measure of long-standing malaria, leads to an increase of 0.4 years of education and a 3 percentage point increase in the probability of being literate. The final chapter studies the effects of malaria on contemporaneous fertility and child survival. In contrast with established theories of the demographic transition, fertility increases as the malaria rate falls. Exploiting the differential effect of malaria on primigravidae versus multigravidae, both the effect on survival and transition to parities greater than one suggest that the biological effects of malaria on fertility and survival dominate income, decreased mortality, and increased survival certainty effects.