Exposure to conflict and child health outcomes: evidence from a large multi-country study

Conflict and Health

Research

Srinivas Goli¹  Astghik Mavisakalyan²  Loan Vu²  Anu Rammohan³ 

[1] Australia India Institute, University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia;Department of Fertility and Social Demography, International Institute for Population Sciences (IIPS), Mumbai, India;Bankwest Curtin Economics Centre, Curtin University, Perth, Australia;Department of Economics, University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia;

关键词: Conflict;    Child nutrition;    Immunization;    Multi-country analysis;   

DOI  :  10.1186/s13031-022-00483-9

 received in 2022-04-08, accepted in 2022-09-12,  发布年份 2022

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundPrevious research has consistently found evidence of poor health outcomes among children living in conflict areas. However, the methodological focus of these studies has largely been on case studies, chart or registry reviews, qualitative studies, and single country studies. This reflects the need for a comprehensive multi-country analysis of the associations between conflicts and child health over a longer period. This study analyses the adverse impact of exposure to different types of conflicts  from in utero to five years of age, on several child health measures across a large group of countries. Our analysis pools data from multiple countries and time-points, to provide robust evidence on the relationship between conflict and child health.MethodsGeo-referenced data on various forms of conflict are combined with the Demographic Health Survey dataset, to construct a large unique database of 590,488 pre-school age children across 52 developing countries over the period 1997 to 2018. Our analysis exploits the within-country differences in children’s exposure to conflict from in utero to age five, to estimate its association with health outcomes. Our multivariate regression models estimate the links between conflict exposure and child health outcomes, measured using child nutrition outcomes (height-for-age and weight-for-age z-scores) and immunization status.Results and conclusionsEmpirical estimates show that even after controlling for a large array of socio-economic and demographic characteristics and location fixed effects, conflict exposure is negatively associated with child nutrition and immunization, across all our measures of conflict. These findings are robust across a range of specifications, alternative measures of conflict and sub-samples.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© The Author(s) 2022

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